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Rise of Chatbot Software: Druid AI
Introduction
Several types of technology solutions are emerging in the low-code/no-code automation space, one of which is automated chatbot platforms. You would be surprised to find yourself on a popular website which doesn’t have a bot nowadays – Uber, Nike and Just Eat are a few examples of big players who have been adopting this technology as an integral part of their digital infrastructure. In 2019 Gartner predicted that 85% of all customer service interactions would be handled without humans by 2021. A prime example is Nike, a company that has embraced chatbots as ‘personal assistants’ for their customers to review, order and search for products via picture upload on their website and app.
DruidAI
Well now the complex development of these platforms is being democratized to allow small to medium sized businesses the opportunity to plug this technology into their stack without having to hire an expensive development team. Instead, they can pay an affordable flat fee to use a low-code chatbot development platform to design their chatbot in whichever way they’d like to use it and scale if and when needed. Similar trends have occurred in the e-commerce space, where the likes of Shopify have democratized the development and deployment of online e-commerce stores with little to no development experience. Now the question is who will be the Shopify of the chatbot space?
Enter Druid AI, yet another rising star in the Romanian Automation Startup Scene, the company has seen a growth rate of 6,753%, been named “startup of the year” by CEE and has seen adoption from companies such as Provinence (largest home credit business in Europe). Their main purpose is to streamline the deployment of purpose built chatbots, utilizing conversational AI automation on their building platform. It allows for businesses to access advanced training and integration capabilities without the need to be a developer.
My Experience
Over the last three months whilst developing an employee onboarding solution on the Appian platform, I integrated a DruidAI chatbot into our site with the ability to answer FAQs, add employees to our backend, update information and load dynamic scheduling information. What surprised me was the large degree of customization, not only in design but also in functionality which was allowed by the platform. At no point did I need to compromise the scope of my solution due to complexity limitations. The platform allows for the more technical minded users to inject code, train the conversational AI on new sets of phrases, and connect multiple APIs into its backend without handling multiple external systems. This was favourable when connecting to our Appian database, which was connected in a matter of minutes in Druid’s API connector interface.
Potential
The real potential of platforms like Druid lie in the fact that it is not limited to a website. The platform works on many channels; APIs, cloud databases, Slack, Facebook, WhatsApp can all be connected to the same chatbot solution. It can easily be used as an end-to-end solution for some business features as well as being configured internally to work as a team management tool. This flexibility lends itself well to the software space with ever-changing tooling and the need for CL/CI pipelines.
Conclusion
It is perhaps still quite early to appreciate the profound impact that Chatbot platforms such as Druid may have, easily mistaking its upper bounds for the simple add-on features they have been used for in the past. However, assuming the continuous improvement of conversational AI integration and accessible building platforms, there is no doubt Chatbots will deliver a plethora of unrealized technical solutions and open doors to new ways of people interacting with software.
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