HubSpot's AI chatbot versus AINIRO

HubSpot's AI chatbot versus AINIRO

Contrary to Salesforce's AI Einstein Assistant which I personally think is a hot flaming piece of garbage, and CustomGPT's AI chatbot you can't embed on your pages - HubSpot actually has an AI chatbot that seems to load fairly fast.

The HubSpot AI chatbot was created by HubSpot's CTO on early 2023. He actually took out 3 months of leave from his daily tasks to create it. It's a cute story, and he's obviously got some skills - But in comparison with a professional-grade AI chatbot, delivered by the experts in the domain, it obviously falls through. However, don't believe me - Watch the following video where I compare both of these chatbots side by side, and make up your own mind.

HubSpot's "AI chatbot problem"

First of all, their UI makes for a terrible experience. Way too much going on in their interface, and way too small fonts. Their AI chatbot doesn't stream tokens, so it doesn't resemble the way a modern AI chatbot should behave. In addition it seems to wanting to bump me to a sales executive after 3 questions or something. The latter sounds like a great idea, until you have that one additional question you need to ask, before you're ready to convert.

Obviously for a sales type of AI chatbot, generating leads and funnelling users into a sales conversation, should be your primary concern. But forcing it the way HubSpot's AI chatbot does, probably looses more leads than it wins. For a customer service AI chatbot, who's primary purpose is to offload human support staff, it's probably a disaster.

A great customer service AI chatbot can reduce manual support by 30%. By forcing users into contacting a human, 100% of this effect is lost. Not allowing users to go window shopping, without having som AI chatbot insisting upon getting you in touch with a human, probably also looses a lot of potential customers due to it being too intrusive.

How would you feel if you went shopping at the mall, and you had a human following you around, asking you once every 5 seconds; "Can I help you? Can I help you? Can I help you?"

HubBot, HubSpot's AI chatbot, also forces me to do several clicks between each question, asking me for feedback about how it did, and forcing me to explicitly state I want to continue asking questions before I'm allowed to continue the conversation. I personally think this is a terrible user experience. An AI chatbot should be there to help you, not the other way around.

Conclusion

Like I said intially, HubSpot actually has an AI chatbot. It's a cute thing, and a year ago it was a novelty. It's also a cute story about how it was created, and I'm sure their CTO had lots of fun creating it. But as a professional-grade AI chatbot, I suspect it does more harm than good - While our AI chatbot have been proven to increase sales by 338% and reduce manual support by 30%.

If you already have a HubSpot account, and you don't have enough money for a professional-grade AI chatbot, HubBot might be an alternative. Just don't believe it will significantly help you with whatever it is you're trying to achieve.

Thomas Hansen

Thomas Hansen I am the CEO and Founder of AINIRO.IO, Ltd. I am a software developer with more than 25 years of experience. I write about Machine Learning, AI, and how to help organizations adopt said technologies. You can follow me on LinkedIn if you want to read more of what I write.

Published 5. Apr 2024