Business AI follow-up
In response to last week’s post about hallucinating AI in business processes, I got this response from a reader, reproduced below and lightly shortened:
We have both a traditional WebUI for submitting IT tickets and a chatbot. The WebUI requires you to pick a request from a list of highly specific requests. [...] The chatbot is supposed to help us find the correct request [...] but it has a tendency to make up links to requests or tell you that it can't find a matching request. So usually I get frustrated and ask my manager who ignores my question for a while and then asks someone else from IT which request we should submit. I think that the whole system could be greatly improved if the company allowed us to submit general request[s] and hired a few people who sort them into the right department. [...] The big difference between your solution and our chatbot is that I am constantly fighting with our chatbot instead of just submitting a ticket and then waiting for a real person to solve the issue. I guess part of the issue is also that our tickets have to be sorted into categories (requests) which are too fine grained. That was probably done at some point to "optimize" the process and save money.
What a great example of how not to do it, touching on multiple points we’ve already touched on:
Creative accounting: Optimizing for support department time while ignoring the huge time drag on those submitting a ticket
Leaky abstraction: The submitter shouldn’t have to know or care about the internal categorization that IT uses for requests
AI for AI’s sake: Does anyone ever get anything useful out of these generic support chatbots?
All topped with the delicious irony of the multiple round-trips: If you have to ask IT anyway, why can’t they just accept the generic request? And then if they want to save time, THEY should be the ones building an AI tool that routes the request.
If that sounds like the AI systems you are using in your company, let’s talk, because there is a way to build it right.
