AI chatbot

An AI chatbot is a text-based conversational agent. It appears as a chat window on your website, or inside channels such as SMS and social media messaging, and replies to what people type in their own words.

Older chatbots followed fixed decision trees: click a button, get a scripted answer. AI chatbots use a large language model, so they can handle questions phrased in many ways and follow a conversation across several messages.

How it works in a business

A useful business chatbot does three jobs:

• Answers questions from your approved content, ideally through retrieval-augmented generation, so answers stay grounded in your own pages and policies.
• Captures leads by asking for name, contact details and need, and sending them to your CRM.
• Knows its limits, passing the conversation to a person through a clear human handoff when a question is outside its scope.

A common failure is a chatbot that answers questions but never asks for contact details, so visitors leave without becoming leads.

How it relates to Worcia

Website and messaging chat is part of Concierge, Worcia's AI receptionist for calls and chat. For setup, scripts and handoffs, read Website chatbots that actually capture leads.