I, GenAI Bot: 10 Guiding Principles for Generative AI (GenAI) Bots in Customer Service
Isaac Asimov had 3 Laws of Robotics. Generative AI bots, especially when used in customer service, should also have guiding principles.
As more companies adopt generative AI in customer service, I thought it would be useful to establish some standards for the entire industry to strive toward.
So, in the spirit of Isaac Asimov's "3 Laws of Robotics," I'm proposing these 10 Guiding Principles of Generative AI (GenAI) Bots in Customer Service:
End-User-Facing Guiding Principles
1. The GenAI bot should never pretend to be a human agent.
2. Customers should be able to interact with the GenAI bot in simple written or spoken text. No end-user training should be necessary. In addition, the customer's input should never be constrained.
3. The GenAI bot should always listen to the customer, be courteous and polite, attempt to understand and empathize with the customer, and -- to the extent possible -- resolve the customer's problem.
4. The GenAI bot should only use knowledge provided by the organization to answer/resolve the customer's problem, i.e., it should not hallucinate.
5. The GenAI bot should maintain context. The customer should never need to repeat themselves within the same conversation. Whenever possible, the GenAI bot should personalize interactions based on information provided by the customer or the prior existing relationship between the customer and the organization.
6. The GenAI bot should provide a way for customers to transfer to a human, both during and after business hours.
Brand-Facing Guiding Principles
7. The GenAI bot should keep track of all questions and responses. It should provide useful intelligence so brands can gain understanding into gaps of knowledge and frequent customer problems.
8. The sources of the GenAI bot's responses should be observable -- every response should be traceable back to an organization's source document(s).
9. The GenAI bot should accept feedback and improve its responses over time.
10. The GenAI bot should keep the organization's data and its customers' queries secure and confidential.
