How Chatbots Are Transforming Our Interactions with Data

For several years now, chatbots have become a fixture in our browsing and interaction habits. At times, they can even feel ubiquitous. We remember their early days—the inherent difficulties of a relatively "closed" model that made them cumbersome to use. However, with the boom in Artificial Intelligence (and specifically conversational AI), chatbots are entering a new era and paving the way for the democratization of data.

When Chatbots Embrace AI

While chatbots haven't always satisfied customers, the advent of conversational AI has offered them entirely new perspectives. The great strength of conversational AI is providing the illusion of human dialogue, 24/7. Users can now "converse" with the machine naturally, without having to wonder about the "right" way to phrase a request. Chatbots leverage the same codes as instant messaging, which is deeply rooted in daily habits.

This innovation has been crucial for chatbots, removing the primary barrier of usage complexity—or rather, the difficulty of obtaining the long-awaited answer. We quickly forget early pitfalls when faced with the current power of these dialogue boxes, which improve customer relations and after-sales service across many sites, particularly in e-commerce.

What is the future for chatbots? Their relevance in customer relations is already proven, but there are many other fields where chatbots have a bright future, notably in the popularization of data within business applications.

A Lever for Data Adoption by Business Units

Companies must manage increasing volumes of data across all areas of expertise, whether it concerns customer, market, or internal data. However, "data" as such often appears complex and difficult to grasp. The challenge of making this data accessible to the greatest number of people, without requiring technical skills, could be met by chatbots trained in conversational AI and fed by the company's structured data.

Chatbots help remove difficulties related to data accessibility, tool management, performance, and data volume. They are capable of compiling, analyzing, and delivering an intelligible and precise summary to the user.

In other words, for companies, this is a highly effective way to approach Self-Service BI. More globally, in the pursuit of data democratization, chatbots are becoming allies in decision-making: they combine ease of use, speed of delivery, and contextualization of information.

Chatbots: The Miracle Solution for Self-Service BI?

While they are extremely relevant today, chatbots have not yet reached the final chapter of their story. Several challenges remain for this constantly evolving technology.

Today's chatbots can encounter difficulties managing heterogeneous data sources and certain formats (PowerPoint, PDF, or other more exotic formats). This is a hurdle for mass adoption within companies that utilize a multitude of different file formats. To overcome this, chatbots are currently often restricted to a specific set of data they can handle without difficulty, provided the existing data is already structured.

Another point of vigilance concerns data security. Implementing a conversational AI can raise questions about data confidentiality regarding the chosen third party (notably OpenAI with ChatGPT).

Aujourd’hui, les chatbots permettent d’ouvrir la voie à la démocratisation de la donnée et à la data visualisation, en donnant la main à l’ensemble de l’entreprise sur un scope auparavant gardé par des experts de la data. Si on attend encore du modèle de nombreuses évolutions pour le rendre encore plus performant à l’avenir, la facilité d’accès s’améliore de jour en jour grâce aux IA conversationnelles qui sont interopérables avec les environnements clients comme Microsoft Power Platform ou encore Qlik.

Today, chatbots are clearing the path for data democratization and data visualization by giving the entire company access to a scope previously guarded by data experts. While we still expect many evolutions to make the model even more powerful in the future, ease of access is improving day by day thanks to conversational AIs that are interoperable with client environments such as Microsoft Power Platform or Qlik.

Read the original article by Pauline Robert on the Journal du Net website by clicking here.