Conversational AI: What It Is & How it Works

Everything you need to know about Conversational AI

In this blog we will unpack what conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is, how it works, and how your business can implement it.

If your business is ready to take conversational AI to the next level or you want to learn more about what it can bring to your company, this blog will guide you through everything from the basics of what an ai-powered chatbot is, drill down to benefits that both you and your customers can enjoy, and where this technology can deliver the most value to your business.


Some of the common questions we'll address are:

• • What is conversational AI and how does it work?
  • What is meant by conversational AI?
  • Why is conversational AI important?
  • How do you implement conversational AI?

3 Key Ways KiwiSaver Providers Can Retain More Customers

We’ve all heard the age-old saying, ‘it’s cheaper to retain a customer than it is to acquire a new one.’

This has never been truer than today where it’s easier than ever for customers to switch KiwiSaver providers. With so many providers available - once a customer is gone, they’re almost impossible to claw back.

Ambit Launches Conversational AI Platform in AWS Marketplace

Ambit Launches Conversational AI Platform in AWS Marketplace, Enabling More Businesses to Deploy an AI Chatbot.

Artificial intelligence firm Ambit begins investment round

Conversational AI platform Ambit is preparing a Series A raise to support international market validation, expansion, and hiring new team members. 

Vodafone & Ambit Partner to Offer Digital Assistant to Kiwi Businesses

5 Genius Ways eCommerce Retailers Are Using Chatbots

As more and more consumers shop online, businesses must find new and innovative ways to improve the buying experience for end customers. One way to do this is with AI chatbots.

The AI Debate: Does AI Deliver Better Customer Experience Than Humans?

Incorporating AI-powered chatbots into online experiences gives marketers a greater range of options for serving customers – from fast, accurate, and consistent, to more nuanced and empathetic, depending on their need.

Top 8 Online Shopping Retailers for Millennials

This week's article is a guest blog written by Maja Talevska of ReviewMoose.

The millennial generation (those born between 1981 and 1996) are, in size, larger than any other adult cohort.

In 2020 approximately 1.8 billion, or 23% of the global population belonged to the millennial generation.

AI Allows Retail Conversations to Happen Online at Increasing Scale

As consumers seek out more personalised experiences online, retailers must find strategies for technology to take the volume while people take care of the value.

Forrester predicts more than 25% of all US retail sales to occur online by 2024, a figure which poses a real challenge to retailers to change their business model to deliver world-class customer experiences at that scale.  

Mythbusters: 5 Common Chatbot Myths Explained

Chatbots are the talk of the town. They’re one of the hottest topics in the technology world today.

Like any new technology, much of the fact and fiction gets jumbled up. This leads to a number of myths and misconceptions that sway popular opinion, particularly among decision makers.

Little Ones Select Ambit to Develop New Zealand's First Digital Employee for Baby Sleep and Nutrition

Release date: 11 March, 2021
Bot name: Lee

Auckland, New Zealand - 12 March, 2020 - Over 160,000 families around the world rely on Little Ones’ expertly crafted programmes to achieve better sleep and nutrition for their children. Parents access their program information, and a pay-walled community called, “The Village” where they chat with other parents and a fully remote, trained team of sleep consultants. 

Why Chatbots Are a Top Customer Service Priority

Businesses are now expected to respond to and solve customer queries instantly to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Customers no longer wait for businesses to respond. They need their answers, and they need them now.

Businesses need to evolve to meet changing customer demands. They also need to scale their operations to cope with the increasing volume of customer engagement through digital channels.

The Evolution of Customer Service: Conversational Automation is Your Key to Success

The ways customers interact with businesses have drastically changed in previous years.

From the early days of face-to-face interactions, phone calls and contact centres, the customer service experience has evolved exponentially.

Shifts in consumer behaviour and advancements in technology are both catalysts for change.

5 Reasons Why You Need a Chatbot in 2021

Experts predict that 85% of customer interactions will be handled without human agents in 2021, the vast majority of those handled by chatbots and virtual assistants.

Why? The traditional means of servicing customers struggle to provide the type of experience that modern consumers demand. Customers now expect a faster, more engaging, and personalised level of service than ever before.

How AI Chatbots Deliver Insights That Improve Customer Service

Chatbots, or Digital Employee's as they’re also called, is capable of having thousands of simultaneous conversations with a variety of different users.

That’s a lot of information gathered about your customers’ needs and wants.

In a world that’s ruled by data, that information is a golden opportunity to improve the way you interact and engage with both potential and existing customers.

3 Ways AI Chatbots Are Transforming Retail Customer Experience

Consumer Behaviour Post-COVID: Has Buying Behaviour Changed for Good?

With the complete absence of face-to-face customer interaction that has occurred as a result of COVID-19, many companies have been forced to rethink their strategy and many are making a complete shift to servicing customers digitally.

Ambit Launches New Zealand’s First Digital Employee for Veterinary Market

Auckland, New Zealand - 12 MAY, 2020 - New Zealand veterinary clinics coping with Covid-19 conditions now have access to a Digital Employee – one that’s willing to work 24/7 without a break.

AI Is Powering a Shift in Digital Customer Engagement

Ambit COVID-19 Chatbot

Ambit has made available a COVID-19 advice chatbot at cost. This will be centrally maintained and updated as required. Various options are available. Please contact us if you would like to know more.

Ambit Featured as Kiwi Tech Startup Seizing Global Opportunity

Ambit recently featured in NZ Business Magazine where Tim Dacombe-Bird, NZ Country Manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS), was interviewed. He calls out Ambit as an example of a Kiwi tech startup achieving rapid growth and success leveraging AWS services in the build of our leading Conversational AI platform.

Nigel Latta Selects Ambit For New Parenting App

AUCKLAND, New Zealand - December 10, 2019 - Parents will soon get easier access to advice provided by clinical psychologists Nigel Latta and Natalie Flynn thanks to a new partnership with New Zealand tech company Ambit. The relationship will see Ambit’s conversation platform used in the new Parentland app to be launched early next year.

Interview: AI Time Journal Discusses Conversational AI with Ambit's Josh Comrie

Ambit Co-founder, Josh Comrie, recently sat down with AI Time Journal to share his insights on how enterprises can start their Conversational AI strategies by identifying the pain points in their business processes and interact with their customers using virtual agents and chatbots.

Ambit Named One of the NZX Early Stage Companies in 2019 TIN Report

Auckland, 1 November 2019 – Technology Investment Network (TIN) has named Ambit one of the top ten most promising NZX Early Stage Companies featured in this year’s TIN Report, launched at a gala awards event in Auckland.

Organisational Consumption of AI: Is Enterprise at Risk of Being Left Behind?

Despite acknowledging the value that AI technology has to offer, stats suggest many enterprise organisations are still lagging behind in its adoption.

Ambit and Reobot bring te reo Māori to Conversational AI

Auckland, New Zealand - 11 September, 2019 - Conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) company, Ambit, is partnering with Reobot Limited, who have created a conversational chat experience to help kiwis improve and practise te reo Māori.

Significance in Semantics: Augmented Intelligence vs Artificial Intelligence

The early emergence of Artificial Intelligence is largely credited to computer scientist Alan Turing, who, in 1950, developed the not-so-creatively coined Turing Test. This ‘human evaluator’ was designed to test a machine’s ability to demonstrate intelligent behaviour to the point that it was indistinguishable from that of a human.

Will Emotional AI Kill Humans or Give Us More to Live For?

A chatbot’s personality forms the basis for the “human” user experience. From start to finish, the way a bot says hello and the way it responds to our frustrations can be phrased in many different ways. 

Customer Engagement: Why Millennials Know Best

Millennials — yeah, those young, entitled and easily offended people you see on their phones 24/7 who use different acronyms every quarter (I think this one is GOAT; “Greatest Of All Time”) and still live with their parents.

How AI Will Change Your Holidays Forever (For the Good!)

There’s two strongly recurring themes in the myriad of conversations I’m having with people about artificial intelligence. The first is pervasive interest. I’ve worked in technology for almost 20 years, and nothing until now has generated both the level of interest – and debate. 

Chatbots to Rule Financial Advice

The Financial Markets Authority (FMA) has made a change that fundamentally shifts the offering of financial advice in New Zealand enabling personalised robo-advice. This move allows for comprehensive disruption of the sector via new and innovative means of delivering advice.

The Real Solution to Auckland’s Transport Nightmare. It’s Not a Train

With the elections behind us, and a newly installed government making pledges to spend taxpayer dollars, it’s time to discuss how AI will fundamentally change one of the biggest issues we face as a society right now. 

The Battle of the Chatbots: East vs West

Chatbots in the West are a relatively new phenomenon.

Facebook launched their chatbot platform for Messenger in April 2016, shortly after Microsoft announced support for chatbots in Skype.  Apple was even later to the party, announcing their Business Chat platform a few months ago.

However, as is more often becoming the norm, the West was soundly beaten by the East in this innovation.

Paranoid of Companies Stealing Your Personal Data? Here’s How Chatbots Can Save You

Trust. The key to a perfect relationship. In a world where knowledge is power, consumers are more and more concerned with their data. (Emphasis on the ‘their’).

Why Chatbots Will Change The Way You Do Business

I just watched the film “Multiplicity” from back in the 90s.

It’s a story about a guy who had too much on his plate. Menial activities like work and admin kept him away from his wife, his family, and other things he was passionate about.

So when he found a way to clone himself, he proceeded to do just that. 

The Digital Workforce: Are You a Leader or a Laggard?

The IDC FutureScape’s digital transformation predictions for 2019 present a list of implications for New Zealand and global businesses.

Are You Prepared for the Future of AI?

Our Bot Maturity Model will help you navigate a bot’s development.

Living In the Tech Bubble: I Forgot That Business 1.0 Is Alive & Well

I love tech. I live and breathe it; from my meditation device that tracks my heart-rate variability, to my heavy app consumption, to the amazing drift button in my car. I love the sweet sauce it brings to my life. To support it, I’ve invested in over 20 hi-tech businesses and grown countless others. 

How to Design Chatbot Conversations That Influence People

Conversational user experiences (UX) take a lot of work. There’s a reason many state “I’m like a child and just learning”, whilst endeavouring to deliver adult grade conversation within months or even weeks of birth. 

Hiring a Virtual Employee

Building and training your virtual employee (VE) chatbot is a vital step in adopting AI within your business. Just as important, is ensuring the adoption of it by your staff (for internal VEs), and awareness of it among your customers (for external VEs).

Forget Bitcoin. Data Is the Currency We Should Be Hoarding

Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Bixby, and Google Assistant. While they all sound like members of a snazzy female pop group (keep up Google!), these are names we will all be speaking to every day. And more often than to our spouse according to Gartner!

Let’s Build You a CRM!

That’s an obviously nonsensical leading statement. Why on earth would you build your own CRM in today’s everything-as-a-service world? You just wouldn’t, would you? Not now anyway — 20 and score years ago, you probably would have, but not any longer. 

So, in the same vein, why would you build your own Conversational AI Platform? 

Negotiating Bots: The Art of the Deal

Negotiations are a part of our everyday life.

From negotiating with your boss for a higher salary to negotiating with your two-year-old to finish her food, negotiations dictate the big and small decisions of our lives.

Negotiations require knowledge, lin

guistic expertise, tactic, and emotion. It is a part of our daily social interaction which makes it an inherently human/biological trait.

Get In Early to Conversational AI

The future is bright for Conversational AI, despite its tentative progress: people overhype innovation when it first arrives but underestimate it once progressed over a few years. 

Is Your Job Safe From the Artificial Intelligence Threat?

Unless you’ve been actively ignoring it, or live in Pyongyang, I suspect you’ll have either read, heard about or seen the naysaying predictions about how AI is going to replace humans, and do us all out of a job. The truth is that none of us really know. The future is literally imaginary. 

Why Digital Employees Need to Be on Your To Do List

In an interview with Tim Warren, CEO and Co-Founder of Ambit, we explore the reasons integrating digital employees into your workforce will help you reduce costs, accelerate your teams’ productivity, and deliver unrivaled customer experience.

Is My Banker Going to Become a Robot?

Chatbots, AI, and finance. There is something exciting about being at the very beginning of a new era in technology. I’ve been here before. I was one of the first staff members of an Internet company, Qbik, in 1996. 

Next-Generation Chatbots: Introducing Digital Employees

When you hear the term ‘chatbot’ you’re probably thinking about janky, unreliable experiences which clutter website interfaces.

We’ve all been frustrated by digital conversations had with someone that is clearly non-human.

Top 5 Tips For a Human-Centred Chatbot Design

After helping over 100 NZ organisations design chatbots – we’ve learnt a thing or two!

Here are my top tips for creating a great human-centred chatbot.

Context Is King – Creating Intelligent Conversations for Chatbots

Chatbots provide a new kind of user interface to computer software. Rather than navigating with menus and buttons on a mobile or desktop device, a user has a conversation with a bot. 

Surprise and Delight - Featuring Tower Insurance's Chatbot, Charlie

Tower Insurance officially announced their chatbot, Charlie, into the world. I have been an integral part of Charlie’s growing up process and I can’t wait to share the excitement!

Why AI’s Black Box Isn’t a Step Towards Skynet

Using machine learning hides what the software is really doing, but maybe that’s nothing new…

Artificial Intelligence (AI), and in particular machine learning, is getting no shortage of mainstream media coverage these days. 

Warning: Bad Conversation Design is a Crime

Context is everything. You don’t just walk up to someone and just start telling them about your new mobile phone deal or that Gartner predicts people will talk to bots more than their spouse by 2020. 

Chatbots in Content Marketing: How You Can Get Ready?

Emerging technologies are shaping every single aspect of the way any modern business operates. So, it’s not a big surprise that chatbots are becoming an essential content marketing tool. Intelligent bots literally take content creation and distribution to the next level.