Gen AI chat bot plugins for sales and support generally suck. Wouldn’t it be great if they didn’t? I wish there was a Chatbot Cup!

Right now no such Chatbot Cup exists but please if you’re interested in organizing one, let me know I’m happy to judge or give feedback. I have 15+ years experience in building ecommerce stores and SaaS. Also almost a year of meddling around daily with Generative AI :)

Illustration by me via Stable Diffusion of that Chatbot glory

This is how it might work:

1. Dummy 5 Shopify stores with a bunch of dummy orders x 5 product categories (Apparel, Gifts, Health and wellness products, Sustainable and eco-friendly products, Personalized and customizable products)
2. Judging panel sets up scenarios for modeling different sales and support situations — ordinary ones going all the way to ludicrous & fraudulent & intimidating ones — trying to get the store owner’s home address or use a fake gift card etc. Set would include discussion of sizes, payments, order status, tracking info, returns. We train an agent to play the role of customer here.
3. We then drop in each participating Chatbot’s 1 line javascript on a fresh copy of each store and boom play the agent on it in parallel.
4. We then format and stylize the conversations correctly and have a distributed judging panel of customer service experts (Shopify store owners and support ops / ppl, ecommerce doyens and so on) rate the best and produce awards in a number of categories.
5. Bunch of great media showcasing the results

It can be funded by each participating chatbot company paying $500 or Shopify just paying for the whole thing, or both, whichever.

It could be like Top Chef for ecommerce & Gen AI nerds wdyt Internet? I think we need to make these sort of gamified tests happen for consumer facing AI chatbots.

EXEGESIS

Written while architecting my own chatbot for www.bestparents.com. Not a Shopify store but going through the frameworks and options and just not digging what I see out there that’s pre-made.

Also met a founder building a chatbot for apparel and have been consulting with Taranjeet and Dharam of https://embedchain.ai/ https://twitter.com/embedchain, who have built the most DXlicious framework I have seen yet for developers looking to roll their own chatbots.

I’m running through the situations and queries in my head and in my notes, even just for sales and marveling at just how much needs to be done to get these bots customer-friendly from end-to-end for me to allow one of them onto my marketplace and how far that is from what the current crop of Gen AI startups seem to be offering out of the box.