Should they deploy a AI chatbot now or wait? What should they consider as they make that decision?
Wanting something because other people have it, is a classic human motivation. Sometimes, this motivation can lead to transformative events; there’s a reason that many people have it in the first place. Other times, one can feel unfulfilled because once they have it, they are unsure how it actually benefits them. External motivation is tricky, especially in this case with AI. But, I heavily agree with Lecinski on this: Jeannie should not green-light a gen AI chatbot “driven by a fear of missing out” because it is not a sound business strategy. Jeannie can totally encourage the application of Gen AI in their business model. But, she needs to think through how the implementation will disrupt not only sales employees and customers, but teams across the company, third-party interactions, etc.
In my opinion, letting AI take over is a loss of control. In this case, you are losing control at the lowest-level of sales, maybe to improve other customer satisfaction metrics. Therefore, I believe, to make sure that some control is maintained, AI solutions need to be somewhat collaborative with humans and have clear mechanisms of oversight. Jeannie and her team need to think further about how the structure of the sales team would change because of this implementation. Who are the middle men? Will a third-party be overseeing the AI solution? Will the sales team be monitoring the AI solution? It’s not as easy as saying, “oh, let’s replace employees with the AI bot” because you may need more employees to oversee, debug, monitor, etc. Even if they were to test an AI solution on other parts of the sales team function like sales training, they would still need to think about these questions. I wouldn’t hesitate to find answers.
