What's with chatbot and emotion? Speakers debate at Techspectations

Entrepreneurs specialising in AI-driven customer services don't feel that emotional connect is a myth in an age of bots. It may not be direct, but works in different ways. "When we get information from ChatGPT that is accurate, we get excited. It is all about solving the issue. If you can get your worries resolved in two questions in the most authentic manner, it definitely creates a bond," said Subrat Pani, Co-Founder, OneAssist.in at a panel discussion on "How Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the businesses we interact with?" at Manoramaonline digital summit, Techspectations, held in Kochi on Friday.

Rishabh Nag, Co-Founder, Humanli.AI, demonstrated his team strength to further drive home a point. "We are a company of ten people; 6 humans and 4 bots. Around 1000 people talk to sales bots everyday. If I am to hire humans to do that job, I would need 14-28 people. I don't have that kind of money. Our sales conversion rate using bots increased by 13% when compared to one done by humans. Sales is happening right now. There is a human connection there. The world is changing, the question is 'are we keeping your eyes open'," said Nag.

When Girish S Pathy, Associate Professor, JAIN (Deemed-to-be University), Kochi, was asked about the significance of teachers when students rely mostly on AI, he stressed the importance of human touch. "We need to train faculties, keep them equipped, like we do in research methodology. The human touch is very important in teaching, you can't replace that," he said.

The discussion also centred on reasons why people are in two minds on adopting electric vehicles. Jijimon Chandran, Founder & CEO, Acsia Technologies, flagged two major factors. "The first factor is anxiety over range because there is a lack of infrastructure. The reason why we need to build more stations happens because of capacity of batteries. The biggest component of an EV is its battery. There is a trade-off between the size, weight of battery and the range of the vehicle. There are a lot of innovations happening, like in an EV car, there is no platform, the battery is the platform. We need to amp our infrastructure," said Chandran.

The speakers exuded excitement for industries sitting on lot of data. "AI plays a key role in a data-rich environment. Whenever any business is replete with high quality customer data, AI has a big role to play," said Subrat Pani. Sabu Johny, Managing Director, EVM Group, said that technology has revolutionalised the way one uses cars and plans are afoot for a complete digital transformation of showrooms.