Based on our own experience implementing Yed.ai at Advanced Programming Solutions, some insights from our customers and research papers (Corea et al., 2020; Lewandowski et al., 2021), we dare to share here some tips to make your chatbot implementation journey smoother. Is it a task oriented bot? Or is it a bot to promote conversation and engagement? If task oriented: what are the KPIs? How will you measure success?

It is only natural that businesses look within their own territory or market to learn about new technology. But chatbots are a global phenomenon, adopted far faster outside the west that most others, so taking a look at their growth, use and adoption globally provides some valuable insights. Both countries have populations of over 1.3 billion people, or over a third of the world's population. That makes them the global focus for customer service automation to battle the sheer volume of calls that even a small public business will receive. Banks, airlines and hotels are adopting chatbots at high speed to cope with the demand, with the likes of WeChat dominating platform usage with its 700 million users across Asia.

They're your personal shopper; they send notifications about your pizza order. Chatbots can update your bank account balance or serve as your hotel concierge--and this digital-transformation trend appears to be on the rise. With the rise in chatbot adoption, the question for many business leaders is: How do I know if--and when--I should capitalize on this digital trend?Getty According to CITI research, Facebook Messenger chatbots are developing 70 percent faster than iOS apps were at this same stage in their life cycle. Up to 80 percent of survey respondents said they planned to use some sort of chatbot by 2020--and for good reason. And according to Juniper Research, businesses using chatbots could save $8 billion per year by 2022 in banking and healthcare alone.

In the short term at least, template-based systems will remain the safest and most implemented approaches--despite their lack of impressive AI and the reality that they can still feel like "brute force" conversational programming. Like open-context frameworks, template-based systems can keep "state" to allow for conversations and not just one-line zingers, and the most advanced template-based systems can make recommendations based on missing conversations. Some can also confirm if not sure, or pass things off to a real-life human if they get confused or beyond their capabilities. Open-context frameworks might sound "cooler," but their unpredictability has stumped even Microsoft, which launched a Santa bot that turned naughty in 2007 and then followed up last year with a general chatbot so trainable that users converted it into a racist in less than 24 hours. Not ideal if that's your customer service bot: if Microsoft can't yet launch a reliable bot with impressive AI, a bank probably shouldn't try it.