Botnation, a French platform for creating scalable chatbots, conducted a survey among consumers and professionals to find out how they view new technologies and artificial intelligence. 1,956 consumers as well as 1,058 professionals in contact with customers were questioned on several themes: robots, artificial intelligence, technologies, always linked to a major question: will robots replace humans in customer relations?

Will chatbots and artificial intelligence replace humans in customer relations?

Within the framework of the study proposed by Botnation, several questions were asked to a panel of more than 3,000 people: consumers and customer relations professionals. The first question concerns chatbots: their advent makes many people wonder about their job and their relationship with these new technologies. The company then asked itself if the individuals surveyed thought they could be replaced by a chatbot. Here are the results:

We can notice that more than 67% of professionals and 56% of consumers think that bots can replace a person in contact with customers. To qualify, only 8% of professionals and 5% of consumers say that this replacement will occur in full. The majority therefore believe that only part of the customer relationship will be carried out by robots: 59% for professionals and 51% for consumers.

As for artificial intelligence, the observation is similar. The respondents answered the following question: do you think that artificial intelligence will replace humans in customer relations?

Respondents think that robots will not replace them, but are still afraid

Botnation then looked at these potential changes and their timing.

29% of the professionals think that it will take a few more years for these changes to become visible and operational. This is supported by 11% who believe that these changes are already effective. While 33% of consumers think it will take even longer. Fear is the other aspect that Botnation studied with the following question: in general, are you afraid that technology will replace you in your work?

More than 78% of French people are afraid of being replaced by new technologies, while we could see earlier that at least a third of the people surveyed did not think they would be replaced by a robot like a chatbot. 45% of professionals and 56% of consumers are afraid of losing their job completely because of technological evolutions and respectively 27% and 29% to a lesser extent.

Emmanuel Francoise’s analysis, founder of Botnation

Botnation founder Emmanuel Francoise analyzed the study his teams conducted:

“Human beings are naturally conditioned to fear evolutions, but also fully capable of adapting to them. It is therefore important to prepare employees for the integration of new technologies such as AI and to educate them on the steps or changes that this implies for their jobs and the company’s organization. It is crucial to show your employees how chatbots will help them, giving them examples of tasks and presenting them that a new and more interesting job awaits them. Bots take care of the most unpleasant aspects and therefore promise to improve the daily lives of many French people.

Employees should be included in these processes, share successes and discuss improvements. The goal is to share the effort of this overall change, as employees are responsible for the success of a robot integration program. It is necessary to get buy-in from your staff to assimilate that AI is not going to replace them. Problem solving still belongs to humans. Employees are responsible for the success of a robot integration program. They must feel valued and understand their critical role in the company’s strategy. At Botnation, we
Botnation, we create spaces to experiment with these technologies by easily developing new prototypes with no-code tools… Like the ones we offer to professionals.”

Translated from Enquête auprès de consommateurs : Les chatbots et l’IA remplaceront-ils les humains dans la relation client ?