Chatbots for customer intelligence are here

Everyone seems to agree that artificial intelligence (AI) will help businesses to automate, provide better customer experience or simply sell more. If we're honest, businesses have been doing these things for decades if not centuries, so why all the concern about AI? Isn't it just a new way of doing the same things? If a bank, say, is using machine learning to detect potential fraud or a telco using neural nets to predict churn, what's so new? These cases are very definitely AI, and have been helping companies to do better for a long time. Executives, however, want more concrete examples.