AI chatbots that take action

AI chatbots are like endless meetings. 

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They are all talk. They share information but rarely take action.

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Sure, you can upload custom data sources and train a chatbot to know a lot. But, if the only thing they can do is surface information, they aren’t exactly the workhorse you’d hoped for.

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But things will change in the near future.

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Automation is going to allow AI chatbots to get more work done and become the hardest working robots on your team. 

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Today I’m going to explore with you what the near future looks like where AI chatbots don’t just talk—they’ll take action. Automatically.

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A world where AI chatbots actually do stuff

First off, go create a free AI Chatbot in Zapier to play around. You’ll notice that it can’t do anything beyond the converse. It can post a link which is a step in the right direction. 

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But look closely and you’ll see one hint at the future: the ability to click a button to trigger a Zap.

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Right now this feature is close to useless for anyone outside of your internal team. If you set up a Zap, it can only take text from the most recent chat interaction which is not that useful.

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While there is a special trick you can use to gather information like a form, it’s not very intuitive. 

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If you’re curious on how to do that, you have to tell the chatbot to gather the information and then return it in a named variable format so that the Zap can recognize the responses and map them as fields. That form is “label(value).” So, for a name “Bryce Vernon” the Chatbot would return name(Bryce Vernon). 

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What would be way more valuable is to surface buttons that could run customized automations and embeddable forms to gather information.

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The possibilities are like an endless Mario rainbow road, but here’s a taste of what this could look like:

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• Website visitors inquire about your services and end up booking a paid one-on-one call via Calendly all through the AI chatbot.
• Customers access an AI chatbot in their customer portal and get personalized documents and reports about their data created for them.
• Lead interactions and activity with your chatbot is captured in a light-weight CRM built in Zapier’s Interfaces) and alerts sent to Slack.

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Zapier’s chatbots vs any other chatbot

If you use a chatbot and it doesn’t connect to your CRM, it’s like welcoming a guest to your restaurant but forgetting to seat them at a table.

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Your chatbot needs to connect to every critical system you use. It needs a place to sit with your business. 

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Other chatbot software is going to start working on these integrations. But, as we’ve seen time and time again with software, creating and maintaining integrations is extremely costly.

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That’s where Zapier is the obvious choice.

With your CRM and tech stack connected into Zapier, Zapier becomes the hub for your critical systems. The best thing you can do is build an AI chatbot directly in Zapier to tap into your connections. 

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I call it automation-centered building and it’s the future of building in no-code.

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To recap:

• AI chatbots only converse, but soon they will take action
• The future is customized automations, embeddable forms, and more
• Building AI chatbots in Zapier is going to give you an automation-centered approach

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That’s all for this week!

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Happy Building,

Bryce