Our team stays up to date on what’s happening in a variety of industries, so we can make those “not-always-obvious connections” of information from one industry that can be really insightful for the event industry.

A recent favorite source for this type of inspiration is Rohit Bhargava’s 15 Non-Obvious trends for 2018. I’ve been consuming Rohit’s insights for a few years now and find that they help me focus on what I see happening in the world.

In today’s post, we wanted to see if we could make some connections between his insights and the events industry that we can all use. Here are ten of the 2018 trends that Bhargava has identified and some ideas for how the events industry can leverage them.

Approachable luxury — Bhargava says that “luxury is no longer defined by scarcity and privilege, but rather through more down-to-earth authentic human experiences that create unforgettable moments worth sharing”. We agree and think the more personalized and customized the experience, the more valued that attendee will feel. Many people are happy to pay more for convenience. Can you capitalize on that trend by offering an upgrade that takes the “work” out of attending your event?

Data pollution — Bhargava points out the non-obvious trend here is that the bigger our data gets, the more opportunities there are for that data to get manipulated, contaminated, and sabotaged. The events industry is starting to get familiar with the access to and the power of data. It is really easy to use your data to come up with the answer you want instead of the answer you need. Instead of trying to become a data scientist overnight (or hiring one), we suggest using trusted partners to help determine goals and derive actionable data. Bluntly, most folks are actually missing pieces of the basic data necessary to help drive insights. We recommend starting with a free scan from Access Fuel to identify where you can augment and improve your data collection.

Disruptive distribution — Businesses of all sizes are building direct connections with consumers. “Disruptive distribution is also inspiring some organizations and industries to consider a more fundamental reinvention of their core businesses to meet the real needs of the customers of the future.”

Do your sponsors really need your event to reach their potential customers or can they reach them on their own? Do your attendees really need your event for professional development or networking, or can they get those things elsewhere? Understanding where your event fits into a buying cycle, or even the professional journey, for all your stakeholders is key. We like the Event Model Generation. Their free #EventCanvas features the Jobs To Be Done theory. (We are big fans of JTBD!)

Enlightened consumption — Bhargava points out, “Empowered with more information about products and services, people are choosing to make a statement about their values… through what they buy, where they work, and how they invest.”

Your attendees may make the decision to invest (or not) in your event based on a whether it connects to a statement about their values. We still like the 3 P’s as a definition of sustainability, or future business success: People, Planet, and Profit. You need all three. A refresh of the Global Sustainable Event Standards is being led by Amy Spatrisano. Watch this space.

Ungendered — Bhargava talks about the shifting definitions of traditional gender roles. We always strive to make our attendees feel comfortable and welcome at our events. At the same time, it is hard to break free from vernacular that most of us take for granted. It is an important exercise to think through the ways your attendees experience your event and which challenges they might face. Delivering a comfortable environment for all attendees is the first step to creating a successful event.

Brand stand — Bhargava points out that “Reacting to a polarized media atmosphere, more brands feel compelled to take a stand and highlight their core values rather than try to be all things to all people.” The old rules of PR don’t apply.

You can’t simply avoid conflict by staying quiet. Your customers or members will come to expect your values to line up with theirs (connects to the enlightened consumption trend above). This is particularly hard for associations who are afraid of alienating members. Be smart about where you choose to highlight your position, but remember that by not taking a stand, your community interprets that as taking a stand anyway.

Touchworthy — “Overwhelmed by digital, consumers turn back toward products and experiences that they can touch, feel, and sense to deliver a much needed sense of calm, simplicity, and humanity.” The book talks about therapy pets (puppy cuddling at events has been around for a few years) and professional (human) cuddlers.

Some events can be very emotional, and because they have been designed with heightened stimulus opportunities, they deliver something more emotionally connective than just an “experience”. In my last role, I tried to engage all five senses into the arrival experience and I found the departure experience to be just as important and even more emotional. Sarah Shewey suggests this magical phrase: “Thank you for being here”.

Human mode — “Robots can work faster… work throughout the night, and offer a consistency that is impossible for humans to match… The positive opportunity of automation is that it has the potential to free workers to focus on the most fulfilling parts of their work and rely on technology to handle the repetitive soul-draining work that is better suited to machines.”

We couldn’t have said it better. Your attendees can be overwhelmed at events because they are out of their element. You want to make sure you’re giving your technology a meaningful job. (Shameless plug here:) EventBots take a conversational approach (powered by AI) that is touchworthy. They save your staff time and money by improving the speed and consistency of your attendees getting their questions answered. By addressing the key needs of attendees in real time, you and your staff can deliver more meaningful problem-solving and more powerful experiences.

Truthing — Bhargava talks about the eroding trust in media and institutions, resulting in people engaging in a personal quest for the truth based on direct observation and face-to-face interaction. Even though we need to take a hard look at the design and formats of our events, the important role we play is getting people together. It is time to truly capitalize on this trend by designing events that let all attendees fully participate in active ways. People are seeking truth but they also want to share their truth.

There are a lot more insights that Bhargava provides and each reader is likely to take something different from his latest work. I highly recommend reading the book so you can begin to connect the dots for yourself.

Originally published at www.sciensio.com.

Widening the Lens and Connecting the Dots… was originally published in Sciensio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A bachelor’s degree in history. A master’s degree in social studies education. Three years working in an inner-city school district. Another three years working in e-Learning and education publishing.

The summation of the past seven-ish years of my academic and professional life hardly screams “THIS PERSON SHOULD DESIGN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE!” And yet, here I am, not only designing for an AI company, but for one that is blazing a trail through the realm of event chatbots.

As my colleague Jessica explored in her most recent blog post (Chatting it up with the Tech Team), Sciensio’s chatbots would be nonexistent without the tireless work of its developers, but the backend systems and development of a chatbot are only half of the equation. Conversation design is just as crucial as the processes that allow the bot to physically run. And that is where I come in.

Although I’m writing with a different audience in mind, many of the principles employed in my “past life” hold true in the world of chatbots. Crafting a dialogue between bots and users is very much like writing textbooks or learning modules. Both tasks require careful consideration of three simple questions: Who? How? What?

Who? Who is the intended audience? Who will actually be using your product?

As a curriculum developer, most of what I wrote/designed/developed was for a very specific audience. A wraparound curriculum for teachers using a 7th grade Washington state history textbook. A standards mastery test prep module for 8th grade students in Georgia. An online study guide explaining the significance of minor characters in The Great Gatsby for 9th grade English students. (Because Owl Eyes and Klipspringer are as important as Tom or Daisy or Jordan, maybe even Gatsby himself!)

In Sciensio’s case, the “who” is the attendees at our client’s events. And like the highly diverse world of ed publishing and e-learning, Sciensio designs bots for a myriad of clients and events, from arts festivals to trade shows to corporate leadership conferences and everything in between.

How? How should you address your users in terms of language and tone?

This question is largely informed by the answer to the first question. For example, the aforementioned standards mastery prep course was designed for students preparing to take a high-stakes, standardized test — a very serious task. It makes sense then that the tone and language be more formal than the online study guide that was designed as a supplemental resource for students who are most likely accessing it outside of the classroom.

The same idea applies to chatbots. An arts festival bot will be less serious and more playful than a bot designed for C-level employees at a corporate event.

What? What are users hiring your product to do?

Like most of the educational materials I helped to design, the answer to this question is similar when applied to chatbots: They are both hired to inform or to support users in some way.

Just as teachers hire the wraparound history curriculum to support them in their classrooms, arts festival attendees hire the chatbot to support their event experience. The bot does this by sharing information with users about key event details like parking, transportation, maps, food, performances, vendors, etc.

While I’m still learning the ins and outs of chatbots (including the best ways to answer the questions above) I’m excited to leverage my love for writing and language in a new and rapidly changing way!

Making the Transition from Textbooks to Chatbots was originally published in Sciensio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Chris Colleran, CTO of Sciensio joined Julius Moster, Master of Science student at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) for an episode of The AV Life.

A few interesting topics came out of this educational podcast:

Chatbots are revolutionizing the way we interact with data and machines. You will commonly hear about chatbots in conjunction with the term AI (artificial intelligence) but chatbots don’t always use AI.

NLP (natural language processing) is the subset of AI (artificial intelligence) that Sciensio uses. Of the different types of interactions Sciensio could design, we chose customer service because our founders had a lot of experience in this realm.

Chris developed his first chatbot for an event he was hosting. He knew his guests would have a lot of questions and he knew they were all the types of things a chatbot could answer.

Here’s how EventBots work: Sciensio integrates with an event registration system and the chatbot sends a welcome message to attendees via text (SMS) offering to answer their questions. Attendees get their questions answered by the chatbot and the event organizer can send additional notifications to attendees during and after the event.

Across all events, there are a core set of questions that make the journey easier for attendees. Some questions are less frequently asked but might be really important to some attendees.

Hiring a chatbot is like hiring an employee (staff, temp, volunteer). You train them on all of the questions your attendees will ask. When attendees use an EventBot to get their questions answered, your event staff can have more meaningful conversations with attendees that support your organization’s goals. For another perspective, read this.

Chatbots can be passed off as a human or a machine. Sciensio prefers to let attendees know that their EventBots are not human, even though the conversation will feel very human-like. Chris shares a great story on the podcast about how people are more willing ask bots questions than humans in some scenarios.

Self-service EventBots and the ability to interact with web pages inside SMS are coming soon. Stay tuned!

Learn more: EventBots.com

Demo on:

• Facebook Messenger: http://m.me/demoeventbot
• SMS: text ‘Hi’ to 1–801–948–2200
• Website: https://preview.sciensio.com/demoEventBot

Contact us: info@sciensio.com

What’s a Chatbot… and Why Should We Care? [The AV Life Episode 69] was originally published in Sciensio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I joined Sciensio four months ago as an AI Interaction Designer and have learned an immense amount about what it takes to build a successful chatbot from the conversation side. My team has built chatbots for an interesting range of events including trade shows, charity auctions, car test drive events, and corporate meetings, as well as some non-events. I’ve learned a lot about what makes a bot conversation successful and what doesn’t. However, being a former software developer, I was curious about the differences between developing for chatbots as opposed to applications. So, I asked our development team what they had learned in the last year and this is what they had to say.

The Hard Part

I was ready for them to get right down to the ins and outs of our backend systems. I was surprised when they told me the number one thing they had learned was the technology wasn’t the hard part. It’s the conversation! To that end, a lot of the code our team writes focuses on improving the user’s experience.

One way they’ve done that is providing a custom initial greeting based on what we know about the user. Our code takes into account what channel they are using to interact with our chatbot as well as how the user started the conversation. This part of our backend system enables us to deliver a personalized experience for the user.

Another way our developers have helped to deliver a better conversation is by customizing the pace so the user has time to absorb it. We do this by breaking up the conversation into readable bubbles and timing the way each message is delivered. These are a few of the ways our developers have made it easier for us on the AI Interaction Design team to be more efficient, build better conversations and leverage the lessons we learn from one chatbot to the next.

Every Chatbot is Learning Lab

This was the most exciting part of the discussion we had. Every chatbot meant we had another opportunity to watch how users interacted with it and we were able to immediately learn and iterate.

For example, we thought if we told the user to get started by greeting the bot with “Hi” they would. Nope! Many users skipped the formality and went straight to asking the bot a question. Since the bot was expecting a simple “Hi” it returned it’s standard greeting which didn’t address the user’s question. This doesn’t make for a good start to the conversation and the user was left confused. This is where our dev team stepped in and built a smarter initial greeting handler that improves the user’s boarding experience.

This is one of the many lessons we’ve learned. You can only imagine how much invaluable data we collected each and every time. After every bot implementation the things we observed and learned were incorporated into our core platform. Our dev team was able to make many of these changes quickly so the next bot we delivered was more successful each time. As a result of these fast changes, the differences between our bots at the beginning of the year to those at the end of the year are night and day.

Integrations are Key

Conversation design is definitely important and regardless of what platform you use to write your bot conversations, it’s still only one piece of delivering a robust chatbot. There are an overwhelming amount of systems out there. Figuring out which ones to integrate your chatbot with is as important as designing the conversation itself and this is where our developers focused most of their time and efforts. First, they needed to figure out what integrations made sense and then they needed to make sure those integrations helped our bots be smarter. By choosing the right integrations we were able to deliver a richer, more personalized experience for our users.

We integrated with systems that would give us data specific to the user which enabled us to deliver a more personalized conversation. We were also able to enrich the user experience by integrating with systems such as Google Maps to provide driving directions. Perhaps the most important way we improved the conversation was by recognizing we couldn’t rely solely on Natural Language Processing (NLP). While NLP has definitely improved since we started, it still needs support to deliver a robust chatbot. It struggles with spelling mistakes, abbreviations and the thousands of ways a question can be asked and that’s just the beginning. Our dev team focused on integrating with services such as spell check, language translation and sentiment analysis to extend our NLP and greatly improve the conversation.

The exciting part for me is that it’s a new year full of new chatbots. We recently all took a day together to make some big plans for our chatbot platform, both technically and non-technically, and we are looking forward to launching and learning even more in 2018! Stay tuned…

About the Author
Jessica Wray is a Sr. AI Interaction Designer at Sciensio and loves being a part of the team that builds EventBots by Sciensio. You can find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Chatting it up with the Tech Team was originally published in Sciensio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2017 saw chatbots gain popularity at many types of events, including conferences, trade shows and festivals, where they have proven they can answer questions 24x7 from attendees faster and more reliably than human-powered responses. For additional background see:

Why are Chatbots and AI Big Event Tech Trends for 2017?

If you are considering a chatbot for your event, here are five tips to help you understand and prepare for how to effectively use one.

Tip #1 — It’s Like Hiring a New Team Member

Chances are pretty good you wouldn’t hire a new team member without defining their role and responsibilities. And once you’ve hired a new team member, you wouldn’t expect them to be successful and add value without training and mentoring.

Adding a chatbot is no different. Think carefully about what you would like your bot to do. Consult with your chatbot vendor about what’s realistic in terms of scope, state of the technology and your budget. Then be prepared to work with your chatbot vendor to train and mentor your bot for success!

Tip #2 — Content Makes the Conversation

The success of your chatbot is heavily dependent upon content. The good news is that your existing event content can be used as a source for your chatbot’s conversation. However, you should expect the following:

• Text messaging, the medium for your chatbot, is typically more concise, casual and conversational than your event website, festival guide or show program. Existing content must be re-worked, typically by your chatbot vendor, to be delivered effectively and conversationally by your chatbot.
• Existing content may not address what your attendees will ask your chatbot, so you may need to create new content or augment existing content with more detail. Example:

• Ensure your content uses consistent taxonomy (terms and phrasing). For example: referring to the pre-event party as a Kick-off Party in one response and a Welcome Reception in another one. It’s easier for users to understand inconsistent taxonomy when they are reading a website or guide because there is often more context. Remember your chatbot responses need to be concise, and users expect bots to be precise, so using consistent taxonomy will reduce confusion and meet users’ expectations.

Tip #3 — Chatbots are Another Channel

Don’t forget to include your chatbot in your communication plan. If you are tweeting or posting about something that is part of your event, it’s likely that your bot will get asked questions about it. Ensure your bot’s conversation is as inclusive and up to date as your other channels!

Tip #4 — Plan for Support

Your chatbot will get asked questions that it has not been trained to answer, so you need a plan for how to address these. There are several human support options your chatbot can offer depending upon the level of service you would like to provide for your event and the functionality your chatbot vendor supports.

• Your chatbot can respond with contact information such as an email address and/or phone number that you will be monitoring. Your human support plan may differ before the event vs. during the event, so make this clear in your bot’s response.
• An attendee can use your chatbot to notify your human team they have a support request they would like addressed by a human. The human team can then take over for the bot and address the need.
• Even if offered, attendees may not follow-up via a phone call, email or have the chatbot notify you. However, because you can monitor conversations attendees are having with your bot you can provide support proactively by taking over for the bot.

Tip #5 — Be Prepared to Hear the Voice of Your Customer

Your chatbot will get asked questions about needs that you may not have thought of. And, you will likely hear about issues that you didn’t know existed or become aware of them earlier because attendees are telling your bot.

Chatbots make it possible for you to hear the voice of your customer, because you can monitor conversations attendees are having with your bot real-time or retrospectively. In addition, you can get alerts or view reports of the questions that your bot is unable to address. Some issues will make sense to address real time at the event (i.e., adding signage, adjusting the audio system, updating your bot’s response with additional or clarifying detail, etc.), while others can be reviewed after the event and considered as opportunities for improvement for future events.

Event chatbots are here! And they are redefining the way we interact with attendees. They’re opening up new opportunities to connect, engage, learn and innovate. Are you ready to redefine how you interact with your attendees in 2018?

Learn more: ConciergeEventBot.com

Demo on:

• Facebook Messenger: http://m.me/demoeventbot
• SMS: text ‘Hi’ to 1–801–948–2200
• Website: https://preview.sciensio.com/demoEventBot

Contact us: info@sciens.io

Additional Reading

6 Ways Your Team Can Accomplish More with an Event Chatbot

5 Tips to Maximize the Value of Your Event Chatbot was originally published in Sciensio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 2010, I project managed an event app for the first time as the director of the largest event held by the Southern California chapter of Meeting Professionals International (MPI). I began to blaze my own trail through the events industry focused on making meetings more interactive and participatory, thinking of attendees as people and not just a person who turns into an attendee when they walk in the door of an event.

That particular app was developed by conference planners. Some of the best, and earliest, technologies in the events industry were created by producers to solve a problem or serve a need in the industry. The early days of event technology consisted of applying technology to systems and processes that had traditionally been manual or paper-based. This is what we thought of as innovative.

Even though we’ve had a massive influx of new technologies for meetings and events, our industry remains stagnant in the ways we design our events. We add features and functionality for the sake of offering more to our attendees without stopping to think about what they really need or want.

We will disrupt ourselves, or we will be disrupted.

Unfortunately, the people who are most likely to disrupt an industry are the ones who are not married to the institutions of that industry. Will we be lucky enough to be disrupted by people who are smart enough to understand people, the intricacies involved in the ways humans communicate, and what attendees’ needs are? We will and we are! I was impressed by every interaction I had with Sciensio when I was in the role of potential client. They were not using young, inexperienced sales people to aggressively cold call me. Instead, I had meaningful conversations with them about technology and the future.

As it turns out, their philosophy is to invest in “getting the right people on the bus”. I used to think the difference between a good event tech company and a bad one was their experience in the events industry but now I know it has more to do with their company culture and this was the kind of culture I had been looking for!

I accepted the position of Product Marketing Manager with Sciensio, the maker of EventBots in November. I have the pleasure of working with these brilliant people to help more events provide what their attendees want and need when they ask for it. I’d love to hear from you about the challenges you have in communicating important information to your attendees or dealing with all of the questions they have about your event.

Originally published at www.elizabethglau.com on December 8, 2017.

Why I joined an #EventTech start-up was originally published in Sciensio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sciensio was named this year’s ibtm world Tech Watch Award winner for it’s Concierge EventBot, an AI chatbot developed specifically for the event industry. The win earned Sciensio complimentary exhibit space at ibtm world and phenomenal exposure through numerous channels!

The Tech Watch Award is the event industry’s longest-standing award of its kind. Its purpose is to identify up and coming technologies that will be increasingly important in the meetings and events industry. The Award recognizes the talented entrepreneurs behind these technologies and celebrates their achievements.

In October, ibtm world named nine finalists for the highly regarded Tech Watch Award. This year’s finalists included: Bizly, ConferencePulse, Eventinterface, Kapow, Ribyt, Sciensio, SharedXP, Snöball and SwarmWorks.

The Judging Committee included a panel of well-known experts from the events and technology industries: Corbin Ball, Committee Chair; Michelle Bruno, President of Bruno Group Signature Events; Dahlia El Gazzar, Founder of DAHLIA+ Inc; Ruud Janssen, Founder of TNOC.org and co-founder EMG; Pádraic Gilligan, Managing Partner at SoolNua; Paul Hussey, director of The Conference Doctor and Julius Solaris, founder and editor of Event MB.

Learn more: ConciergeEventBot.com

Demo on:

• Facebook Messenger: http://m.me/demoeventbot
• SMS: text ‘Hi’ to 1–801–948–2200
• Website: https://preview.sciensio.com/demoEventBot

Contact us: info@sciens.io

For more on this year’s Tech Watch Award see:

• IBTM World 2017 Technology Watch Awards Recognize Outstanding Event Industry Tech Achievements | TSNN Trade Show News
• ibtmworld Show Daily
• ibtm world announces finalists for 2017 Tech Watch Award

Sciensio Named ibtm world 2017 Tech Watch Award Winner was originally published in Sciensio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Five event tech startups went head to head at #IMEXpitch on October 10, 2017 in front of an expert judging panel at IMEX America, a must-attend event for meeting and event professionals from across the world to share innovation, business opportunities and knowledge.

#IMEXpitch is a showcase of the most innovative event tech and gives event professionals a glimpse of the technology set to make waves in the industry.

The five finalists selected to deliver fast paced presentations about their innovations to the judging panel and a live audience were: Mixtroz , Sciensio , AtlasRTX , Bizly and Snöball. And the judging panel included: Greg Bogue, Maritz Travel Company; Tahira Endean, CMP, DES, CED, BC Innovation Council; Tim Groot, Grip; James Johnson-Miller, IMEX Group and Dahlia El Gazzar, DAHLIA +.

Sciensio was crowned the winner for it’s Concierge EventBot, an AI chatbot developed specifically for the event industry, earning free exhibit space at IMEX America 2018!

Learn more: ConciergeEventBot.com

Demo on:

• Facebook Messenger: http://m.me/demoeventbot
• SMS: text ‘Hi’ to 1–801–948–2200
• Website: https://preview.sciensio.com/demoEventBot

Contact us: info@sciens.io

For more on this year’s competition see:

Sciensio Takes Top Prize in #IMEXPitch 2017

Sciensio Crowned Winner of #IMEXpitch at IMEX America 2017 was originally published in Sciensio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When chatbots re-emerged in the Spring of 2016, information about them was limited. But as the technology has advanced and become more mainstream, so has the availability of information…and some fallacies, too.

Let’s take five and clear up five of the most common misconceptions!

Misconception #1: All Chatbots Use Artificial Intelligence

Fact: A chatbot may…or may not…use artificial intelligence.

There are 3 basic types of bots:

1) Scripted chatbots rely on a rules-based conversation that follows predetermined paths. At each step in the conversation the user must pick from explicit options typically presented via a menu and/or buttons.

2) Intelligent chatbots are built with artificial intelligence, in particular the Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG). NLU interprets what the user says and maps it to a computer representation. NLG produces a natural language response that can be understood by the user. Currently the content of the responses aren’t created by the technology but typically written and/or developed by humans.

There are two sub-types of intelligent chatbots:

• God Bots which include Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant and Cortana. These bots possess general knowledge across a wide range of topics.
• Purpose-Driven Bots in contrast to God Bots have a narrow focus. Purpose-driven bots are designed and developed to provide information and/or perform tasks within a tightly defined scope.

In the not so distant future, you may be asking your favorite god bot to coordinate with purpose-driven bots to accomplish tasks on your behalf such as scheduling meetings, booking travel, ordering pizza and sending flowers!

3) Hybrid chatbots use scripted conversation supplemented by NLP to support free-form texting. The menus and/or buttons of the scripted conversation help guide users and the artificial intelligence ensures the chatbot can handle a broader range of texting interactions such as when the user deviates from the script by free-form texting.

Misconception #2: Chatbots Can Run on any Messaging App

Fact: Chatbots can run on many different messaging apps but not all.

WhatsApp, the dominant world leader in messaging apps, currently prohibits chatbots in their Terms of Service. But, stay tuned this may change. WhatsApp recently announced they are verifying business accounts and exploring ways for businesses to message with their customers.

Chatbots may not be allowed on WhatsApp yet, but they can run on many messaging apps including but not limited to: Messenger, SMS, iMessage, Twitter, Telegram, Viber, WeChat, Kik, Slack, Cisco Spark and Microsoft Teams. In addition to messaging apps, Chatbots can also run on a website or within another type of app such as for banking or shopping.

While chatbots can run on many different messaging apps and even on websites and in apps, the technical requirements for each of these differ. And the user experience will also differ depending upon the functionality supported.

Misconception #3: Chatbots Can Learn Entirely on Their Own

Fact: For most organizations, intelligent and hybrid chatbots need to be developed and trained by humans.

True machine learning currently requires massive amounts of data that very few organizations have and even fewer have the capability to use for machine learning. The human training of chatbots is known as supervised learning. Once a chatbot is live and responding to users on it’s own based on what it has been developed and trained to do, it can learn on it’s own to a certain degree within a set of parameters. However, you may not always like what it learns! So a bot’s unsupervised learning must be reviewed by humans and corrected as needed.

Misconception #4: Chatbots Can Replace Human Staff

Fact: While chatbots can handle basic questions and tasks, humans are still needed to address complex questions and issues.

“…If you look at almost every other tool that has ever been created, our tools tend to be most valuable when they’re amplifying us, when they’re extending our reach, when they’re increasing our strength, when they’re allowing us to do things that we can’t do by ourselves as human beings. That’s really the way that we need to be thinking about AI as well, and to the extent that we actually call it augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence.”

Rob High, VP and CTO — IBM Watson

Here are three ways chatbots can augment human teams:

1) Always Available — Would you like to expand your team’s availability but face budget and staffing contraints? Good news! Chatbots are economical and can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. And they are always on time, pleasant and never take a personal day.

2) Ability to Scale — Do you find it challenging to scale your team during peak times? Or you have an opportunity to expand or grow your business but need to support it? Chatbots facilitate scaling by augmenting your human team. You can use chatbots as the first point of contact to handle basic questions. This frees up your human agents to address more complex questions and issues. If the chatbot is unable to address the customer’s need, it can invite a human member of the team to the conversation.

Adding a chatbot to your team means more customers served! And with the basic questions handled, your team is freed up to address more complex questions and issues.

3) Consistent, High Quality Service — Your team likely answers the same questions over and over again. Chatbots are well suited for answering your customers’ frequently asked questions and they never tire of them, so each and every one of your customers gets the same high quality service.

Misconception #5: Users Shouldn’t Be Told They’re Talking to a Bot

Fact: No transparency, no trust.

While chatbots can mimic human conversation and interact with humans, they are not human. In a study of thousands of individuals, CEB (now Gartner) found that transparency ranked as the highest priority for consumers and it also has the largest impact on loyalty. Trying to pass off a chatbot as a human — no matter how well-intentioned — can damage the customer relationships you’ve worked so hard to build.

Almost every customer experience expert agrees: You should always be honest with your customers about whether they are interacting with a bot or not. As Beyond Philosophy’s Michael Lowenstein puts it, “If organizations are not transparent about how and where chatbots are being used with customers, and that the chatbots are offering responses only as programmed, trust could be very seriously impaired, even destroyed.”

The Top 5 Misconceptions You Need to Know About Chatbots was originally published in Sciensio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Society of Independent Show Organizers (SISO), the largest association of the leading for-profit trade and consumer show organizers, recently held their annual Event Innovation Battlefield competition on August 3, 2017, as part of its annual SISO Leadership Conference. This year the nominating committee chose five out of 50 considered organizations that represented breakthrough event technology or amazing new business models. The five nominees included: Aromachology, Buster, Sciensio, Eventuosity and interactio.io.

“The Event Innovation Battlefield competition was a version of American Idol meets Shark Tank where attendees voted on their choice for the most innovative of the innovative for 2017”, according to David Adler, CEO of BizBash and Co-chair of the SISO Battlefield.

And this year’s Event Innovation Battlefield winner was… Sciensio for it’s Concierge EventBot, an AI chatbot developed specifically for the event industry.

Learn more: ConciergeEventBot.com

Demo on:

• Facebook Messenger: http://m.me/demoeventbot
• SMS: text ‘Hi’ to 1–801–948–2200
• Website: https://preview.sciensio.com/demoEventBot

Contact us: info@sciens.io

For more on this year’s competition see:

• Event Tech Competition Selects Concierge EventBot as Most Innovative
• Event Concierge Tool EventBots Wins SISO Event Battlefield Competition | TSNN Trade Show News
• Event Innovation Battlefield

Sciensio EventBot Voted SISO 2017 Event Innovation Battlefield Winner was originally published in Sciensio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.