I agree with the expert that they should not deploy an AI chatbot right now. It seems like the motivation for the AI chatbots is to use them to replace human representatives, and they have a naive assumption that the AI chatbots can generate the same as the current revenue, but with less costs. Instead of accepting there are more nuanced reasons for why PulsePoints has lower margins than its competitors, they want to just jump forward with something that will be expensive to implement and maintain, and probably will change their customer base and revenue flows anyways.
Being realistic
If you are already doing worse than your competitors despite the AI chatbots, there’s probably room for improvement in other aspects of your company. We don’t always need to innovate, sometimes improving existing infrastructure is the most realistic and impactful. I agree with Leskinski that the company should shift their focus into seeing how AI can help strengthen margins by streamlining the efficiency of sales (and still improve profitability). Even though GenAI is the future, I feel like Jeannie needs to know that her company might not be able to support being the trailblazer. In this case it makes sense to stand back and see where other companies make mistakes so that they don’t waste money and time when they’re already behind.
Future steps
Perhaps in the future once PulsePoint knows it has the resources and infrastructure to support an AI chatbot, and has some ideas from other companies about what works/doesn’t, they could roll out trial runs, and eventually add an AI Chatbot. Ultimately though, I feel like the AI chatbot would work best in conjunction with human representatives, not as a replacement. No matter what, AI will not be able to reason, fact-check, and make nurturing decisions the way that humans do. There’s a lot of work in how AI can’t replace human relationships including human marketers [1, 2]. Especially at a marketing company, where human perception matters most, they might run into issues. Cutting costs will probably not come from an AI chatbot, but rather other applications of technology.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/17/ai-cant-replace-human-relationships-especially-not-a-therapist.html
[2] https://loudandclear.today/why-you-cant-replace-human-marketers-with-ai-but-you-should-use-it-anyway/#:~:text=1.,That%20takes%20human%20brainpower.
