Increasingly, brands are using chatbots for interaction with people. These chatbots utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI) to predict human moves and provide solutions accordingly. They conduct vast level of data warehousing to store information, analyze and interact. This has led to cost reductions and ease of transactions, yet for some aspects human interaction is being missed. Customer loyalty is anyway fleeting these days, and the possibility of technical errors by these chatbots leaves marketers open to further brand erosion. Organizations are getting too dependent on machine learning or social media like Twitter. The cost is certainly one factor, but companies need to provide real time feedback to customer queries or complaints when they resort to social media. Amazon is one organization trying to put all this data collected to better use through its Echo device which plans to develop genuine human level empathy to its bots post processing and deriving meaningful business intelligence. So while these machine interactions have benefits, the human side must be cultivated in parallel by the top brands to get holistic benefits.

Source:http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/customer-engagement-talking-human-still-matter/