One may forgive customer service technology users for laughing out loud at the suggestion of AI gaining sentience. They have a difficult time simply bringing their chatbots online to solve basic customer problems, let alone assigning them metaphysical characteristics.
This comes as rogue ex-Google engineer Blake Lemoine said he believes that Google's LaMDA, a large language model in development, is sentient.
While chatbot technology is evolving, the bots available in today's market are nowhere near sentient, according to a panel of contact center technology users and other experts. Much more work needs to be done to make customer service chatbots integrate with existing enterprise IT to automate even the simplest tasks.
"If you have some experience chatting with these things and see the results of these new models, it does change something in terms of your perception," said Dan Miller, Opus Research founder. "You know it's not sentient, but it's perfectly capable of sounding very human -- and other times just being bats--t crazy."
Pegasystems founder and CEO Alan Trefler said he doesn't believe it's possible that Google LaMDA is sentient, and thinking about it in those terms "confuses the conversation" about AI. As constituted now, he added, AI tech can be used for good, such as making people more productive in their jobs. It can also be used for more controversial applications such as facial recognition for law enforcement.
People identifying chatbots as sentient beings dates back more than 50 years to Eliza, the original chatbot, which was released in 1966 and set up to talk like a therapist. Trefler remembers fellow Dartmouth students developing relationships with Eliza in the mid-1970s. Lemoine fell into the same trap, Trefler believes.
"This is, frankly, just a classic case of anthropomorphism," Trefler said. "It is so natural for humans to attribute human values, human motivations, human cognitive skills to dogs, cats and machinery … it's a natural vulnerability that we have."
IT gets in the way Sentient or not, customer service chatbots need a lot of care and feeding to perform their jobs. Present-day bot tech suffers -- and customers get frustrated -- because chatbots can't easily integrate with legacy systems to access the data and automate tasks. There is real AI tech that isn't sentient but can be deployed at enterprise scale, said CX consultant Phillip Jackson, co-founder of Future Commerce,a retail media research startup and podcast. The problem for the creators of these technologies is that they must deal with "the slowest moving organisms on earth -- the enterprise." "You can't integrate anything because you have 65 middle managers not contributing anything, and they're all obstructing the actual boots on the ground," Phillips said. "The engineers don't have actual access to the real data, or they themselves are obstructions because they are encumbered with legacy tech debt that are the vestiges of digital transformation efforts 15 to 20 years ago that stalled." Virgin Atlantic airlines deployed chatbots for customer self-service in 2018 through Microsoft Virtual Agent and Genesys, on channels including WhatsApp, SMS and Apple Business Chat. During the pandemic year of 2020, customer contacts spiked 500%, and the company supersized its chatbot self-service operations because it had no other choice, said Ceri Davies, who manages a Virgin customer service center in Swansea, Wales. "We are hugely invested because we were in a position where we were able to contain a lot of our customer contact within our chatbot," Davies said. "We couldn't just increase the amount of people that we had when the company was under such tough measures." But the bot can't think for itself. To do that, Virgin Atlantic now dedicates a full-time analyst role to monitor chatbot performance and figure out how to solve even more customer problems, when possible.
