What’s a Chatbot and When Will Procurement Get One?
Bots are taking over. No it’s not an apocalyptic army of drones hell bent on taking our jobs before inevitably learning they are better off without us and moving on to conquering the world. The revolution is around chatbots and it seems anyone who is anyone in tech is taking a swing.
First it was Microsoft, but more recently Facebook and Google have joined the race to create chatbots. Smaller startups too are entering the market with Slack recently announcing that it will invest $80 million USD in Slack bot startups to support its desired growth in the segment.
But what is a chatbot?
In its most basic form a chatbot is a computer program that is designed to replicate human conversation (usually over the internet). They are nothing new either, the ELIZA chatbot was written by scientists at MIT back in the 60’s. It’s very rudimentary but the conversational concept directly matches that of today’s more developed offerings.
What has changed with chatbots in recent years is the amount of information they have now got access to. While ELIZA responds with little more than rhetorical questions that challenge (quiet literally) your sanity, today’s bot are ordering your UBERs and suggesting your next audiobook. By leveraging Big Data and Artificial Intelligence solutions, the bots are getting smarter.
It’s gonna break the internet.
But not in the Kanye West ‘flood the server’s’ kind of way. Bots will reinvent the way we interact with the internet. Browsers and desktops will be replaced by chat screens. We’ll ask our bots the weather and the time that the football games start rather than search for it ourselves.
Buying products on sites like Ebay will be much more streamlined with the addition of bots. By removing our reliance on on human responses to messages we’ll speed things up greatly.
Want to know the number of miles on the motorbike you’re thinking of buying? How about the amount of taxes you’ll need to pay and the paperwork you’ll need to sign to get that baby insured and on the road? Your bot will provide all this information in real-time.
Anything that is mundane and time consuming will be done by a bot.
How come the bots I’ve seen so far suck?
The important thing to understand with bots is that we are at the start of what will be an incredibly sharp progression towards capability. It’s true that today’s bots are limited. Everyone who has received an odd answer from Siri to a question they never asked already knows that. This lack of capacity is due in a large part to the fact that mastering human language is incredibly difficult.
Language is hard to understand. Let’s examine the following phrase from the English language that exemplifies the challenge nicely.
THE COMPLEX HOUSES MARRIED AND SINGLE SOLDIERS AND THEIR FAMILIES.
This sentence plays with our common parts of speech assumptions. At first, you probably assumed “complex” was an adjective, “houses” a noun, and “married” a verb. Actually, the sentence only makes sense if “complex” is a noun, “houses” a verb, and “married” an adjective.
Did you get it? Was it it too much? Either way, processing language is a challenge even for the human brain, so it stands that computers have a long way to come. Currently machines can mimic the way we talk, but they have a difficultly understanding exactly what we’re trying to say, especially when we talk in our less formal voice.
Change is afoot though. Companies like Google and Facebook are now spending many millions of dollars to better process human languages. As highlighted in this article, Facebook is creating technology that will vastly improve the way that human language is processed. In short, if you think bot performance sucks now, you won’t for long.
What About Procurement.
As mentioned above, we’re very much at the frontier of what’s available in the chatbot space. In terms of what the future might hold for procurement chat bots. Imagine telling a bot to prepare your RFP, asking who has responded and how well they’ve responded, to find the top ten suppliers for a particular product or to identify substitute products.
Imagine if your bot plugged into your ERP and SRM systems to give you up to date information on your firms and suppliers performance that could be drilled into simply by asking more questions.
If your boss asked you a question you didn’t know the answer to you could just ask your bot for the answer (would your boss need you anymore?). Imagine understanding supplier risk in ten times more detail than you currently can. Imagine creating a greater understanding of your market, your firm, your supply base and your job simply by asking a bot a question. That’s what I see as the future for procurement chatbots. Isn’t it great?
How do you feel about bots? Do they scare you? Do you hate them? Do you think they’ll take your job (for some of you I think they might)? Or are you thrilled at their potential to reimagine the way we work and live?
