From Chatbots to AI Agents: The Future of Customer Service

Chatbots have come a long way since the early days of “dumb” rule-based systems. The evolution of this technology has been both swift and fascinating, with advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence leading the way.

The biggest breakthrough has proven to be the appearance of large language models (LLMs) and platforms like ChatGPT. In the nearly 1.5 years since its debut, ChatGPT has mostly overcome its initial bugs, including the “hallucinations” that made initial applications less than reliable.

This has led to a wide variety of implementations for AI chatbots, but the demand is still growing and the best is no doubt yet to come. The next logical step will be the implementation of chatbots that not only understand customer inquiries and respond to them, but are also able to perform actions for the customer, just as a human agent would.

Keep reading to see how autonomous, AI-powered agents are perfectly positioned to be the future of customer service in eCommerce.

How we got here

The first chatbots were simple and text-based, with the ability to engage in simple conversations and provide basic responses. The introduction of deep learning and neural networks in the 2010s revolutionized chatbot development. Natural language processing and machine learning became central to chatbot capabilities, and led to the rise of smart assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, culminating in ChatGPT.

What is the difference between AI chatbots and conversational AI?

These terms are commonly used interchangeably, but in fact they refer to distinct (but related) technologies. An AI chatbot incorporates machine learning, natural language processing, and generative AI to understand language and handle a more expansive range of conversations.

Instead of being given fully programmed dialogues like a rule-based chatbot, these bots are trained on conversational data that allow them to parse sentences, understand intentions and context, and generate relevant responses even when a user says something new or unusual.

An AI chatbot can answer customer questions based on the content of an online store.

Meanwhile, conversational AI is a technology that simulates the experience of real person-to-person communication through text or voice inputs and outputs. It incorporates machine learning, natural language processing, and generative AI to help users engage in free-flowing dialogues that resemble human-like interactions. It strives to make interactions with machines more natural, intuitive, and human-like through the power of artificial intelligence.

In essence, conversational AI is the engine that makes a good AI agent work.

What are AI agents capable of?

A chatbot can help resolve common eCommerce customer service scenarios, but the experience can still be a frustrating one for customers who receive irrelevant answers to their questions. An AI agent powered by conversational AI results in a far more user-friendly, human-like conversation. All inquiries (not just FAQ-based ones) are easily handled with natural language, and its approach is constantly adjusted to fit each unique scenario it encounters.

AI agents also use conversational AI to perform advanced tasks that are made possible by deep integration between the AI agent, the online store platform, and third-party apps like those that handle logistics and payments.

eCommerce AI agents either are or soon will be capable of taking on even more advanced tasks, such as order cancellation, reshipment, the creation of return labels, address updates, partial refunds.

At PerfectBot, we’ve adopted the general principles behind conversational AI to train our chatbots on real user feedback, making them perform more like an AI agent in the process. We create reports highlighting popular topics and gaps in your chatbot’s knowledge in order to help you identify and fill content gaps, and we can help you update your chatbot’s knowledge via a wide variety of sources, including Internal Notes in Gorgias, a Knowledge Tracker spreadsheet, email, Slack, or a training call.

PerfectBot, an AI chatbot for Gorgias, can be trained just like a human agent.

The future belongs to AI

Currently, it is possible to handle 40% of all chat queries across industries without human intervention, but there’s good reason to expect that the capabilities of AI agents will continue to improve. The agents are built on increasingly powerful base models, which perform much better at a wide range of tasks, and we’re also learning more about how to build agents themselves. It’s anticipated that before the end of this decade, AI agents will be handling approximately 80% of all eCommerce chat queries.

Does it mean that human agents will be obsolete? Not by a long shot – the other 20% of interactions will be the ones that can’t happen without a human touch – customer relationships, rapport building, and retention efforts. Think of the way that an airplane’s autopilot system assists its human pilot, and then apply that to eCommerce customer support – customers could get instant support from an AI agent, human agents could get instant answers from an AI copilot, and customer support leaders could get instant AI insights at their fingertips whenever they needed.

Conclusion

Any company that can implement a chatbot that harnesses AI to provide an experience that feels like a chat with a human agent (as opposed to choosing a preset response from a menu) will be well-positioned as the decade progresses.

At PerfectBot, we’ve seen the future and we’re on our way there. We’re staying on top of AI agent development by listening to the feedback from our clients and adapting the chatbot operation to the Gorgias helpdesk, Shopify, and other software environments.

Try PerfectBot for free with no strings attached and get started on the path to giving your customers instant, accurate answers to any questions related to their business. The future is now!