Why bother paying for your own generative AI (genAI) tokens when you can have the computations done for free using a competitor’s AI-powered customer service bot? That question is at the heart of a CIO.com report that explores the trend and various ways to block it.
It’s possible the best response to this kind of computational chicanery is to ignore the thieves and stay focused on delivering the best service for customers — hopefully boosting revenue by doing so.
The CIO.com story offers a detailed look at how to combat the problem — options that include limiting the number of tokens that can be used for a single answer and layering on AI to validate that questions are legitimate.
But all the proposed approaches have major downsides. For one, the frequency of these inappropriate “queries” might be limited — and the costs of tokens used to handle them might not break the bank.
My argument — to ignore the issue — includes both good and bad facets. On the positive side, genAI-based chatbots, when properly deployed, have the potential to be more efficient than human customer service people, and far better.
Specifically, genAI tools can handle highly-complex queries. Consider Amazon. With its various partner programs, it has an astoundingly large number of products in a massive number of categories. No human could have deep understanding of all of those SKUs and certainly wouldn’t be able to answer technical or detailed questions about them. GenAI, properly trained, can.
Or consider a customer who chats with a high-end restaurant bot, saying: “We have a reservation for 12 at your restaurant tomorrow night. The problem is that seven of those people have dietary issues, including one vegan, one who is strictly kosher, one gluten-free and several others who have rare allergies to specific ingredients. I am pasting a detailed description of the dietary issues for all 12 people. Can you review the full ingredients for all of your menu items and recommend to us several entrees, side orders, soups, salads and desserts that would accommodate all of our guests? That way, we don’t have to pepper the waitstaff with questions such as ‘Is the sugar you use vegan?’ or ‘Have you segregated the cookware for strict kosher?’”
GenAI is especially well suited to handle that kind of question and an accurate answer might win customers for life (though it might use up a large number of tokens). But if it buys the loyalty of new customers, that’s a powerful win.
That said, there remains a serious concern. I have argued that AI can be a powerful tool, but its hallucinations make it a bad choice for direct customer interactions. It’s the same reason I don’t back enterprise use of autonomous agents. Agents are great, but they are not nearly ready to function autonomously.
For some companies, “GenAI can sometimes make things up and do so in a highly confident manner” is going to remain a deal killer. And it’s not like there’s a reasonable chance hallucinations will be eliminated anytime soon. (Indeed, the more sophisticated these models get, the more they hallucinate. Lovely.)
But if a company can set the hallucination issue side for now — I know. It’s like that line, “Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” — genAI customer service chatbots have serious potential. And if a few stray coding and recipe requests rob you of some tokens while gaining you new customers, it’s a trade-off worth considering.
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