Vendors wanted: A large US 'quasi-government' website is hunting for chatbot solutions
Here is a great example of the opportunity for the Conversational AI industry. It's a post I came across earlier on one of Reddit's Artificial Intelligence communities with over 640,000 members. The poster asked users for their recommendations for a chatbot that can answer visitor questions on a 'quasi-government' website.
The poster explained that about 90% of the visitor questions could be answered by about 200 pages of documents, policies and procedures – I'd then assume that the chatbot would redirect those 10% of unknowns to human agents.
Here's the poster's query:
Looking for a chat bot for a large quasi-government website
ideally, the chatbot would be GREAT with the LLM to interact with customers answering their questions with a complex government website. All the answers to 90% of questions would be in the site's 200 or so pages of documents policies and procedures. (I know there are a bunch like this... but what do you find outstanding?)
The poster then qualifies this with a 'nice to have':
this would be interesting if you have a suggestion...but if not please still suggest) next level good would be a chatbot that adds a life-like animated person to speak the answers to peoples questions.
Another user asked whether this was a State or Federal request, to which the poster replied: "County". My basic understanding of US Government structures indicates that this is still quite a big ask. National --> State --> County, right? Something like that.
Calling All Chatbot Vendors
If you're a vendor offering this kind of technology, dust off your Reddit account – or find the person in your team who loves Reddit – and get them to reply with a bit of useful information about your offering. Nothing too 'salesy' – but just point them in the right direction, as this Reddit poster is clearly in need of some good advice.
So far, no one has replied with any vendor recommendations – and the post has been live for 8 hours. (If you'd like me to reply with a suggestion, just send me a note!)
Broad Demand
Isn't this fantastic? It's a super example of just how massive the demand will be for chatbot and Conversational AI technology. Someone at this US county-level quasi-government organisation has clearly thought, "there must be a better way".
In fact, the know there's a better way. They're clearly familiar with the technology enough to be able to use the terms and describe what they're looking to achieve.
There's clearly not an RFP process going on here. Not yet, anyway. This is an example of someone who has used enough chatbot technology to know what's possible – and is looking for some kind of solution that will help the end-users of their website and, I imagine, boost efficiency for the quasi-government organisation.
When venture capitalists and private equity are busy throwing millions at companies in the Conversational AI space, this is one of the reasons why. (Off the top of my head: Hello Cognigy and their $100M raise, or hello PolyAI's $51M recently). There is going to be so much demand for all kinds of solutions, from almost every sizeable organisation, in every country.
It's also interesting that the individual hasn't – yet – been able to locate a vendor or a solution. So much so that they felt compelled to post on Reddit to ask for some feedback.
One user replied quickly with this:
Any LLM will do this. Vectorize the documents you have and set up a RAG database with them
That's accurate. But it doesn't help the poster – if they were technical, I think they'd have already hacked something together as a proof-of-concept. If it's quasi-government they're ultimately going to need a government style service level.
So, who what vendors would you recommend the poster looks at?
