Lessons Learned from a Chatbot Failure

Have you ever had a chatbot set up a meeting with someone you've never heard of via calendar invite, respond with "bye" after you decline the invite, then prompt a human to enter the email chain who calls you by the wrong name? We get a lot of emails from vendors, but they usually involve press pitches. A vendor, through its chatbot, set up an unprompted meeting with me. Things got stranger when I engaged. While the exchange was surreal and entertaining in equal parts, it was a good example of where bot technology and artificial intelligence can fail and, even more importantly, a reminder for brands to do better deploying such tech into their sales and marketing processes.