[thrower123]

Chatbots are really hot in customer service and internal helpdesk applications, because there is that belief that they will offload interactions from hitting a real agent.

I'm skeptical, because the chatbots built to do that are often so bad that people just spam "agent" or "operator" or whatever they have discovered is the magic word to shortcut the bot, the same way that they do with voice phone trees.

You could probably build some decent chatbots if you had strong domain knowledge to draw on and skilled developers building them. But that's not usually the case; it's most often farmed out to a team attached to the Cognizant or TCS or Cap Gemini type outfit that is already handling that function, who are not terribly skilled, don't care, and are viewed as a cost center. So it is usually a poor result.