The AI Book

CHAPTER 14Showcase and Customer Service: Leveraging Chatbots in the Banking Industry

By Yvon Moysan¹

¹Academic Director, IÉSEG School of Management

Brief History

According to Andrew Leonard, a bot is “an autonomous computer program supposed to be smart, endowed with a personality and which most of the time, gives a service”. The term “personality” is justified by the level of anthropomorphism of the bot. The assumed intelligence of the bot brings us to the notion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) proposed by Marvin Minsky and which consists in “creating machines that can make human tasks which require intelligence”. One of the well-known examples of this kind of AI is Siri, the numerical vocal assistant of iPhone developed by Apple. When this bot interacts on platforms such as Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, we then talk about “conversational agent” or “chatbot” (a combination of “chat” and “robot”).

Chatbots aim to improve interactions with customers. Gartner already predicts that, across all sectors, 25% of mobile interactions will be conducted via conversational agents by 2020.¹ Moreover, Gartner predicts that by 2020, individual customers will have more conversations with a bot than with his or her significant other.

The Expansion of Chatbots

Considering the advantages of chatbots and the positive predictions of development, combined with the current growth of mobile utilization, firms are tending to use more and more chatbots as part of their suite of customer relationship ...