Concierge bots, super bots, master bots, triage bots – call them what you will, but they’ve rapidly become false idols for some companies that have waded or plunged into deploying automation technologies.

We entered 2020 already in an era of disruption where companies are competing in the race for AI adoption. With the unexpected impacts from COVID-19, that urgency has become even more important. It’s only natural  for companies to look for a solution or quick fix. Many have learned the hard way about how necessary a strategy is, but without knowing what strategy for conversational technology looks like, band-aids are often mistaken for solutions.

Today there is an aggressive spike of companies facing the problems that inevitably come with having launched bots that were created through a fragmented, uncoordinated approach to building bots. To most who have bots in the wild, it is (or will soon be) painfully obvious; whether you’ve launched bots to serve employees or to serve customers, you’re swimming in the dark if you’re operating without a strategy that ties your conversational technologies and implementations together to work in coordinated ways.

We hear from enterprises on a daily basis who are reaching out for help with problems they’re now experiencing with their growing and increasingly fragmented assortment of bots built on various platforms and technologies. They’re facing the pain and costs of failed adoption, and often lack insight and control over scalability, governance, security, innovation and user experience.

One bandaid in particular has rapidly become a popular false idol or mirage that’s perceived as a solution to these issues. It goes by many names: superbots, concierge bot, master bot, or triage bot. The hope is that their organizational issues will be solved by a single bot that becomes the concierge for streamlining all their bots.

The OneReach.ai platform is one of few platforms that allows you to create such super bots, etc. and the only platform that allows you to do that without coding – but be warned – doing so is just a band-aid. Competing requires a strategy for creating a coordinated ecosystem of technologies that work in concert. A concierge bot could in some scenarios be a reasonable step and may be part of such a strategy, but  without a strategy, it’s no better than if you were to build an index page for a website that was built without a content strategy, coordination, brand standards, or processes for quality assurance.

One common example will be familiar if you’ve put a FAQ chatbot on your website. There’s a strong chance that you’ve also wondered why people aren’t using it or don’t like using it. It’s not hard to imagine why companies gravitate to simple FAQ chatbots. The content already exists and you can relatively quickly put this exciting new technology front-and-center on a website. It seems like an easy win, but companies tend to try it, watch it fail, and then unplug the project without ever really understanding why it didn’t work.

This is just one of many experiences happening en mass right now by companies that have begun using conversational technologies without a strategy for creating a coordinated ecosystem. As companies inevitably realize they’re already in a race for AI-adoption, it’s very normal to jump in and start taking action, and it’s increasingly easy to do so.

It’s only a matter of time until these fragmented approaches lead to costly shortcomings in scalability, governance, security, innovation and overall limitations that come with what seemed like the easy quick route to getting some simple chatbots. Jumping in without a strategy is sort of like waking up one day with an urgent need to climb Mt. Everest, and then immediately starting to run toward it. With such an advanced and high-stakes expedition, you wouldn’t make it. Whether you’re a beginner to such expeditions or an expert, the first step is to stop and think it through. Develop a vision and a strategy, and equip yourself with the tools, supplies, team and philosophy and plans needed to reach the peak instead of dying.

Technology grows more powerful, more pervasive, and more sophisticated every day. Most companies struggle to keep up with the pace of change.

The companies that have an edge right now will put themselves far out-of-reach to competitors.

We’ve drafted a whitepaper that can hopefully provide a foundation for creating a vision that gives you the confidence to step forward.

The findings revealed in the whitepaper are based in years of research and experience building thousands of conversational applications.

Our hope is that sharing the best practices and insights we’ve gleaned can make the crucial difference for enterprise companies struggling to balance the problems that come with those random acts of bot-building. A strategy that fosters co-creation with a conversational interface can be the road away from collections of disparate bots that disappoint companies and their users alike, leading towards the creation of an intelligent ecosystem.

Get the whitepaper that aims to equip problem solvers and leaders for going beyond with a strategy for building an intelligent, coordinated ecosystem of impactful automation—a network of skills shared between intelligent digital workers.