Interview with Rob Lubow, Cofounder, CMO, Botcopy

We thank Rob Lubow from Botcopy and Google Cloud Partner for taking part in this interview.

What improvements have come from Botcopy for AI in business?

Botcopy gets the world closer to the holy grail businesses and the public sector dream of, namely, chat experiences that can automate end-to-end without human intervention in many cases. How? We offer the #1 website and app messenger for Dialogflow, Google’s AI engine for conversational automation. 

What companies have you seen implement changes to stay ahead of the AI in the business curve?

Botcopy has over 20,000 customers, and that includes some massive ones. For example, Realogy, Riot Games, and the State of California have launched significant use cases impacting key metrics. They’re deploying conversational AI experiences on their high-traffic websites (millions per month), and their chatbots know more information. Also, they can understand natural language, keep context, authenticate, collect data and tie it into third-party apps and services. The possibilities of what they can do are endless because the backends run on Google Cloud Platform and Dialogflow and can scale into other Google products to make their bots incredibly powerful.

How do you believe leadership plays a role in an AI workplace?

Leadership is essential. Good AI products generally require a team working in tandem, often trailblazing new ideas and approaches. Plus, new AI solutions, once deployed, need constant monitoring and optimization, and continuous learning from mistakes. Unfortunately, unsupervised learning in conversational AI for narrow use cases is rare. So leadership has to organize a supervised-learning team around tasks that bring a project to maturity. This process could take months or years to unlock the massive potential and requires solid leadership to keep everyone focused and accountable.

What advancements do you believe Botcopy could make to benefit people in the future?

Our tech has been helping the public sector build and deploy extremely smart chatbots. Public sector tech teams are looking to put tax dollars to better use and make lives better for their citizens. Unfortunately, government agencies are often swamped and wait times and backlogs can be a real issue! In addition, bureaucratic processes can be daunting for end users. Govs deploying conversational AI with Botcopy get advanced AI solutions onto their websites quicker and more affordably, which directly impacts the quality of life for ordinary people.   

How do you believe AI has affected the job economy? Do you think that chatbots can make it better or worse in the coming years?

Any time you automate human-led tasks to increase the output of goods or services, there are potentially excellent outcomes. It’s odd to think that abundant laborless production would worsen the world. Still, automation comes with risk, depending on the economic and social structures where the automation occurs. On the one hand, as chatbots get more competent, service will be instant and satisfying at scale. But, on the other hand, there isn’t a ceiling for how intelligent AI-powered chatbots can get over time. So at some point, either new types of jobs will need to emerge to replace the call and contact center jobs, or societies will have to adapt to the realities of less dependency on human labor. The likely outcome probably involves a bit of both. 

Where do you see AI technologies, such as chatbots progressing in the future?

The technology already exists for chatbots to be virtually as good as dealing with a human being for a limited use case such as customer service. The problem is the implementation is too hard for most companies. We predict this will get easier and have committed to making this happen. Our new live chat suite will allow teams to set up chat stacks that train the AI agent with every query that doesn’t get matched to a response. The default will escalate to a live agent, and the AI will immediately program that troublesome query into the bot’s knowledge base. With this process, expensive mistakes and escalations will approach zero asymptotically. Seamless live chat tools explicitly designed to ensure customer happiness while capturing every drop of learning and passing it to the AI team will be the new norm.

How do you believe AI and people can work in tandem in the workplace?

Chatbots aren’t just to help consumers. We see a tremendous amount of employee-facing use cases. For example, when employees need fast information about company protocol, inventory, or any number of things, they can ask an intelligent AI-powered bot instead of sending the request to a centralized office in a different timezone, which could take days to answer the question. We saw this with Genentech, a large biotech firm, deploying AI-powered chatbots that save scientists and doctors time during the R&D and trial processes for developing lifesaving medications. Especially during the pandemic, it could take days to get an answer on a specific protocol. So Genetech’s team created bots that could answer questions in mere seconds about protocol changes.

About The Author

Scroll to Top
Share via
Copy link
Powered by Social Snap