You think your customers want human AI; you may be wrong

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Artificial intelligence, including automated virtual assistants, is a hot topic for brands. The AV market is expected to grow more than sixfold, to $23 billion by 2027, accelerated by the COVID-19 era desire to meet customer needs remotely and at scale. From Alexa to Slackbot to Capital One's Eno and Domino's Dom, lately it seems like every brand has its own VA.

The way brands approach the design of AV experiences today is very diverse, and it seems that they are particularly interested in those that are very human: the AVs that aim for the appearance and behavior of real humans who have already responded to these requests. But this is where brands potentially go wrong. Instead, they might strive for a more-than-human virtual assistant.

Let's say your brand decides to create a VA for your customer service experience. You know brands benefit when customers feel less like they're interacting with an institution and more like they're interacting with a trustworthy human. You know big data and AI can seem intimidating and impersonal. You think putting a human face on an algorithm can make it more comfortable, natural, intuitive.

After all, customers are used to talking to humans in assistant roles. It would be easy to think that customers would want to preserve as much of that experience as possible, whether or not the intelligence on the other end of the line is human or artificial. It might follow that replacing the human with the artificial is best done with an artificial human likeness.

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So you give the VA a recognizable human name, personal pronouns (probably her/him), describe the VA thinking/feeling/acting like a human, from "She's your advocate, always looking for ways to help" to "She's your friend, ready with a joke to cheer you up. You design the VA to have a voice that sounds friendly, agentic - it introduces itself by name, uses a familiar vernacular, tells jokes, jokes about food. You give it a human face.

But this approach comes with baggage.

For one thing, it sets expectations, which can (and very well can) lead to customer disappointment (customers don't really interact with a human, after all). At worst, it can lead to perceptions of deception.

Furthermore, while we may find human interaction comfortable in the abstract, we...