Alex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
Are chatbots coming back to life with AI?
Why you should build your own AI chatbot
- Fetch, transform, and ingest your data into avector database
- Spin up a chat interface from atemplate
- Connect to a super-intelligent AI model, likeOpenAI’s ChatGPT, that uses your content and can have a conversation with someone — answering their questions like an expert
- Underlying data used by the chatbot- you can add all your private forecast reports or internal process docs and learning materials.
- User interface and branding -you can make it feel like it’sreallya part of your existing stack.
- Data privacy and security -you can decide what happens to a user's chat history, or how ingested data is stored and processed. If your data is particularly sensitive, this may even be table stakes.
- Access to your secure or private systems -systems that you wouldn’t want to expose to a 3rd Party.
Why you shouldn’t build your own chatbot
- Initial business case:A custom AI chatbot for a business isestimated to cost upwards of $50,000and these costs can quickly spiral upwards for use cases that require a high degree of accuracy or where a company has large volumes of content for the chatbot to access. You will need to justify this to management, likely before you can demonstrate the actual value.
- AI expertise:You’ll need people in the business who understand how LLMs work at a high level. Especially what they can’t do. This expertise will be essential if you want your chatbot to be more than just a novel toy for customers or employees (better start actually reading that AI book you bought yourself to “get up to speed”)
- Product continuity:What happens when you leave? Looking forward to having to document how your AI chatbot works for the next person or team?
- AI provider and model selection:You’ll need to decide on which AI provider you partner with and which AI model you want to use. This will involve weighing up the Pros and Cons and trade-offs you’ll need to make e.g. Speed vs. Cost vs. Quality
- Keeping up with AI developments:You’ll need a team to constantly stay on top of the latest AI developments to make sure your chatbot is leveraging the newest tech. But importantly, to make sure you’re not reliant on methods that are being phased out. We’ve seen changes to AI models that change answer quality overnight, the solutions for which, never seem to be straightforward!
- Preparing your data and content: The data processing stage is crucial, this is where your content is manipulated into an optimal format for AI models to use. There are 20+ small, technical, decisions packed into just this topic and hundreds of edge cases to consider (did you know Arabic takes up 4x as many tokens as English for example?). There are already large groups of companies dedicated to solving just this problem, likecarbon.aiandpsychic.dev
- Automated chat testing:You’ll have to define a testing approach to understand how changes you make affect the quality of your chatbot. The biggest challenge here is the sheer number of permutations that are available to you. We worked out there are over 1 million combinations today, and this grows with every new model and parameter. With each permutation, you have to test your AI chatbot like real humans would — but in an automated way, at scale, to be meaningful.
- Integrations:Do you want to integrate your chatbot with Slack or Teams? Or embed it on your website? These are all additional features that need to be built and approvals for them takes months with A LOT of back and forth on minor details.
Why reinvent the wheel?
ㅤ | If you want to BUILD… | If you want to BUY… |
AI capability and knowledge | Existing internal AI capability or expertise | Limited or no existing AI knowledge in the business |
Data sensitivity | Highly sensitive data is required for the AI chatbot to access | Private (not highly sensitive) or public data and content |
Content type | Business content is static and limited to <500 items/reports/documents | Business content can be dynamic, growing, and, available in large volumes of >1,000 items/reports/documents |
Dedicated team | Ability to dedicate a team to building and managing an AI chatbot | Objective to integrate AI chatbot capability into an existing team to manage (like enterprise search) |
Chatbot as core differentiator | You expect an AI chatbot to be a significant differentiator and part of your business’s offering | An AI chatbot will leverage or enrich your business’s existing core offering e.g. your editorial trend reports |
So, what next?
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Alex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.