Chatbot
In short
A chatbot is software that answers questions in ordinary language. Two builds worth keeping apart: a rule-based bot follows a fixed decision tree and can only do what someone anticipated. A language-model bot composes freely, which means it can also assert things that are not true. Choosing between them is a risk decision, not a matter of taste.
Which build suits which job
Rule-based wherever a wrong answer is expensive. Opening hours, delivery status, booking an appointment: closed questions with vetted answers. The bot is dull and never off.
Language-model based wherever the question is open and the answer comes out of your own documents. The effort then sits in the source, not in the bot: a model working from last year's price list will quote last year's prices with total confidence.
The mistake we see most
Assuming a chatbot takes work off support. It moves it. What goes away is the repetitive questions; what stays is the hard ones — plus a new job, which is keeping the bot's answers current.
A bot with nobody named to maintain its sources goes stale quietly. Same mechanism as a neglected FAQ page, except nobody notices, because the answers still read fluently.
Disclosure — what applies in Switzerland
Switzerland has no AI act of its own. But anyone serving customers in the EU comes under Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, whose Art. 50 requires that people can tell they are dealing with a system rather than a person.
Separately, the FADP applies regardless: whatever personal data the bot takes in is processing like any other and needs appropriate technical and organisational measures (Art. 8 FADP, SR 235.1). A chat window that ships enquiries and names to a provider outside Switzerland is a decision, not an implementation detail.
How we handle it
We build the source first and the bot second, and we let it say when it does not know rather than guess. More under AI agents and AI consulting.
Our opening question: which ten questions come in every week? If nobody can answer that off the top of their head, the bot is not the next tool.
Related terms
A term in your quote that nobody explained?
In a strategy call we translate the offer in front of you — even when it did not come from us.