1 out of 5 (21%) of all self-directed user queries relate to “advice.” The types of advice users seek range from dating tips, managing difficult bosses, health, to outfits for a theme party. At right are a sample of user experiences capturing “advice” prompts with video and audio.
How do you know if someone likes you? (Bard • Female • Millennial)
After reviewing many of these user experiences, here are some of our observations:
- No platform does particularly well here
- The responses are reasonable but quickly feel generic and canned; they could be given to anyone vs something better fitting a particular nuanced situation
- This can lead to disappointing experiences as users expect more human-like advice
Implications
Businesses that provide advice as a product or service - particularly in fields such as healthcare, legal, financial services, and consulting - should study the types of prompts users ask AI and the responses AI provides. Not only to see what is being said, but also to judge accuracy. Those with expertise in a given topic can best judge the tendency for an AI platform to hallucinate within that topic and to see where it might be factually correct but makes wrong assumptions or under-reports critical things.
Just as the medical profession experienced a surge in people coming into their office with print outs of things they read online, AI promises to create a new level of self-educated experts who will try to get advice on their own. If your business can provide that advice using the AI tools available, and thereby lend accuracy and credibility to it, then that might be the best of both worlds.
Moreover, a human being on your team is more likely to ask the specific personalization and context questions that AI may not ask, or even if asked, may not be given. (Personalization will be a topic in a future issue of Pulse IQ).
