Own The Conversation - Issue #48
Own The Conversation is a weekly, manually curated newsletter with all the news in the world of Conversational AI.
Hello friends!
It seems this week has been a rather slow news week because everybody has been at events and conferences.
We’ve had SaaStr, HRTech, Re.Work and many others going on this week all over the world. If you did manage to get along to any events, I hope you enjoyed it/them.
Thank you for, once again, tuning into my newsletter. If you think it would be valuable to your network, please feel free to share.
And if you’re coming here off the back of a share or a LinkedIn post, then this should make it nice and easy to subscribe:
Without further ado, let’s move on to the juicy stuff!
Conversational AI Jobs
Firstly, let’s talk about Conversational AI jobs. Hiring is still happening at full pace, so make sure that you sign up for alerts at Bot Jobs and keep up to date with the latest roles in our space. Plus, be the first to know about some interesting developments coming soon to Bot Jobs.
Top of the list today is a fantastic conversation design role at an amazing organisation.
Followed very closely by several roles being advertised by our friends at Emotech Ltd:
👉 For a 50% discount on job postings on Bot Jobs, use discount code BOT50 when posting featured jobs - available for all Own The Conversation subscribers 👈
Now, onto the interesting news, articles and content of the week.
Conversations To Own
Firstly funding. From what I can see, it’s been a pretty slow week on the funding front (please correct me if I am wrong). I’ve only got one great story to share, which is that synthetic media company, Rephrase.ai, raises $10.6 million in series A funding.
Now, interestingly, I’ve seen a few articles and reports this week which have been bashing chatbots (et al). So I wanted to concentrate on this for the newsletter.
First, a new report from the Institute of Customer Service revealed that artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots have become a rather unsatisfying experience for the majority of customers.
According to the report, “Two in five people (42%) avoid chatbots when making a complex inquiry and 15% lack confidence in using technology to contact organisations”. And according to the Institute, if technologies like chatbots were “well designed and implemented”, most customers would be happy to use them.
Well, yes, that’s the biggest problem. Isn’t it?
Next, and this is more in my world of recruitment chatbots, a report on staffing technology from candidate.ly and Talent Tech Labs gave us this interesting graphic on the view of staffing chatbots:
So there it is - 57% of teams (from their survey sample of 114 staffing firms - there are ~40,000 in the UK alone) shows that 30.8% would deem them as not effective or delivering an ROI and only 29.2% as above average.
This pains me greatly! However, it was this comment that gave me the most distress:
“[Chatbots] are unable to respond effectively to complex inputs […] and their capabilities are limited.”
Well there it is, folks, this is the result of everything I have been saying about the state of recruitment chatbots for some time. I’ll dive into this a lot further this week in a series of LinkedIn posts, but in my opinion, recruitment and staffing chatbots are failing because:
Most vendors/enterprises don’t employ conversation designers when implementing chatbots
Most staffing firms will only pay for an off-the-shelf no-code decision-tree chatbot and most instances of chatbot do not use any form of Conversational AI
Even when they engage a vendor, (in most cases) the vendor will leave it up to a recruiter to implement and design the chatbot
Most tend to use either chatbot or live chat and don’t employ a solution that starts with automation and has a seemless human handover.
We all know that companies can do great things with chat - even automate up to ~80% of inbound conversations - but without:
strategy
buy or build advice
design
implementation
ongoing support
A chatbot is always going to fail. And that’s very frustrating to me and, I’m sure, the Conversational AI community at large.
Stay tuned for more thoughts on this as the week progresses.
Events to Attend: September - December
September
NVIDIA GTC
Sept 19-22, 2022
Online
Conversational AI Summit
Sept 22–23, 2022
London, UK
AI Summit Silicon Valley
Sept 28–29
Santa Clara, CA
Voice of Healthcare
Sept 29, 2022
Boston, MA
Botrepreneurs Online Networking Event
Sept 29, 2022
Online
October
Voice Summit 2022
Oct 10–13, 2022
Arlington, VA
World AI Summit
Oct 12–13, 2022
Amsterdam, NL
November
Open Data Science Conference
Nov 1–3, 2022
San Francisco, CA
Voice of Money
Nov 9, 2022
New York, NY
December
AI Expo
Dec 1–2, 2022
London, UK
AI Summit New York
Dec 7–8
New York, NY
We’ve been given an extra public holiday here in the UK, this Monday, due to the Queen’s funeral taking place. This past week has been a spectacle of tradition and pageantry of the likes we’ve not seen in most of our lifetimes. It’s been truly remarkable to see people (of all walks of life) queuing for almost 24-hours through London just to pay their respects to our previous monarch.
Anyway, if you want to add anything into next-week’s newsletter (events, news, articles) then feel free to DM me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or even TikTok
Here’s hoping you have a great week.
Martyn