Glossary
What is a chatbot?
A chatbot is software that holds a conversation with people, in text or by voice. Older chatbots followed fixed scripts and broke when someone asked something unexpected. Modern chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini use AI language models to write each reply. They understand almost any wording, but they can also give a confident answer that is wrong.
Why it matters for a business
Section titled “Why it matters for a business”A chatbot is a product, not a model. Two chatbots on the same model can behave very differently, because what makes one useful is everything around the model: its standing instructions, the documents it can search, the systems it can reach and what is checked before a reply goes out. A customer-facing chatbot’s answers also count as the company’s word. A Canadian tribunal held an airline to a refund rule its own chatbot had invented, and rejected the argument that the chatbot was separate from the airline.