Beyond the Chatbot Brief

By Shane Abrahamovich

Recently, I recalled reading Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” a sci-fi story from 1950 that reflects on the “golden age” of economic prosperity and consumer growth. Eerily prescient for its time, it’s a cautionary tale of how technology can reshape human behavior, relationships and responsibilities. 

In the story, the Hadley children come to rely on their highly advanced and autonomous nursery so much they begin to see it as a replacement for their human parents. The nursery not only bathes, clothes, and feeds them but it also realistically renders any scene or setting the children desire —in this case, a savannah-like grassland complete with hot sun and lions prowling in the distance in Africa. Meanwhile, the parents recognize all too late that their desire to spoil their children has backfired. 

This concept is called reification, the result of treating an abstract idea as if it were a real, concrete thing. The parents provided extremely advanced technology, without fully understanding its capabilities or ramifications, and the children began to treat it, not just as a replacement for their parents, but as a mechanism for catering to all their whims, 24/7.

Artificial intelligence is under a similar pressure as companies “thing-a-fy” it into solutions based on how they believe their customers should engage with them, solutions that overwhelmingly follow the chatbot model. There’s Siri, Claude, Sparky, Rufus, and on and on we go. Maybe someone will revive Clippy. 

It’s becoming all too common to reduce a vast set of tech-powered capabilities into a singular platform that can further be personified with a name and sometimes a face. But much like the Hadleys, companies should broadly be careful about jumping to this conclusion and engaging in the reification of Artificial Intelligence. Technology can meet functional needs but should never substitute for core human roles, like empathy, judgment, care and relationship-building. 

As product leaders, we actively shape how and where artificial intelligence shows up. So the most important thing to ask yourself is what are you solving for customers? To help answer this fundamental question, here’s two paradigm shifts that I foresee defining the next era of AI-enabled products: 

Human behavior (and the platforms we rely on) are broadening

For the majority of my career, the brief for digital products was similar: Websites and apps. But this is no longer the way. It doesn’t mean websites and apps are dead, far from it. They will have a role to play, but an organization must be prepared to experiment across a larger number of surfaces and touchpoints to find the product/market fit that was once very uniform, especially as surfaces themselves become more numerous, intelligent, and multi-modal. 

AI is breaking the chains of the aforementioned brief and setting customers free. And thus they are now showing up in all different nooks and crannies that weren’t possible before. This is the case regardless of industry – it’s true for retail, financial services, travel, and more– and customer behavior is no longer as homogenous as it once was. And the behavior is where the focus should be. 

Leveraging an AI chatbot as an experiment in understanding behavior, not a strategy, is where the opportunity to provide a groundbreaking service lies. If you can truly understand customer behavior you can design to a segment of one rather than segments of many because AI, paired with those surfaces, personalized data, and context, can also more accurately predict the who, where, and when of your customers.

As we study behavior, trust is paramount. Customer data will get more personal as AI tools have the capability to enable deeper and more personal aspects of people’s lives. 

Time will tell exactly what data we can (and should) capture, but the really exciting thing is what we can do with that data if and when we have it.

Secondly, it’s about platform intelligence

One truth about the human experience is that conversation is something we lean into — it’s a productive way to collaborate, share ideas, find solutions, and generally understand each other. But conversations happen across different mediums and there are also more to them than words and sounds. It’s all senses working in tandem, in a context, that allow us to properly socialize: body language, tone, perceived intent, where am I, who are these people, why am I here, etc. And sometimes conversations happen without an actual conversation; unexpected flowers, a birthday card, a phone call out of the blue. Actions can indeed speak louder than words. 

The promise of AI is to achieve this nuance with you, the customer, who can be in many places throughout the many contexts of your day, where you could use support. Like the parent who is taxed with the mental load—the invisible cognitive and emotional labor of parenting and running a household. That person doesn’t need just another broad recommendation meant for a segment of people, they need a platform that is anticipating their specific needs and providing solutions proactively. Wouldn’t it be better to recommend diapers knowing they are low and shipping them a new package before they run out? 

From this perspective, a chatbot might be the right solution some of the time, but certainly not all the time. We hear from brands consistently that they are seeing customer journeys are increasingly fragmented, and AI chatbots work well in moments when customers prioritize text-based conversation. But when we think of Artificial Intelligence as a broader set of capabilities—one that can show up wherever your customer might be—we open the door to creating an intelligent platform capable of serving them in every moment.

With the right data and approach, this shift is possible with AI and puts your brand in a position to not only build trust with customers through providing services that matter, but evolve to serve them in new ways. It’s possible, for example, to expand into being a lifestyle brand, a wellness coach, or a health advocate if your platform enables you to engage in an actual conversation rather than just a transaction.

Resisting Reification

Amidst all of the change we’re experiencing, one thing remains constant for those of us who create, design, and build products: the product iteration cycle. We create a hypothesis based on research, we test that hypothesis, and we adapt. That fundamental approach is no different today than it was 20 years ago. We have some pieces of the puzzle and no doubt a chat interface is one. But there’s no magic bullet. You still have to commit to understanding your customers. Our customers are just changing, and so are we, as we undergo one of the biggest shifts in human culture to date.

As we do so, we must resist the temptation of reification lest we find ourselves alone, baking on the hot African veldt.

About the author

Shane Abrahamovich is a Partner of Product Management based in LA. He is a proven product leader with a background in UX and design, research, agile development and prototyping, and strategic operations. He brings a wealth of expertise in running products and managing product oversight on brands including Toyota, Pfizer, Chase, Verizon, and lululemon among others.