As conversational AI begins to take over the world, chatbots are being given a new lease on life. However, there are clear risks on the road ahead. Parcel delivery giant DPD recently had to disable part of its online support chatbot afterward I swear on the client.
One user was able to convince the chatbot to harshly criticize DPD, convincing it to criticize the company in the form of a haiku poem.
This incident is a warning sign for regulated industries like healthcare and insurance, where leaving the heavy lifting to a haphazardly designed chatbot can leave an organization open to legal action. Open the dialoguea UK startup from some serial entrepreneur founders, believes it has an answer by combining the new world of LLMs with a customizable platform for regulated sectors.
It has now raised $8 million in a Series A round led by Alboin VC. Dowgate Capital and several notable angel investors also participated, meaning the startup has now raised a total of $13 million.
The demand for conversational AI is growing exponentially and is expected to reach that Explodes To $38 billion globally by 2029.
However, regulated sectors are still grappling with Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Large Language Models (LLMs). OpenDialog says its focus on healthcare and insurance will make it a good fit for these industries.
While an LLM may be able to seem like human context and understanding, regulated industries need high guardrails on an AI-driven approach.
OpenDialog claims that its no-code platform could allow insurance giants and the likes of the UK’s NHS to mix and match the best AI models in a single automation platform.
It also claims that one insurance client has automated 9 out of 10 tasks, from selling insurance policies to handling claims.
Co-founder and CEO Terry Walby told me during a phone call that the platform has a “flexible architecture that means you can manage the conversation in a way that’s very similar to conversations that humans have, which is unpredictable. It can anticipate the unexpected, and I can respond to it and respond.” on it and not lose the flow of the conversation.
What Walby is hoping for, of course, is that by not building on a single foundational model, and having a more flexible platform, OpenDiolog will be able to mix and match different LLMs so that customers can get the flexibility they want.
This may be the case but it may leave OpenDiolog open to the accusation of being merely an ‘middleman’ operator rather than having a robust platform of its own.
He objects that breaking away from a single language model means that it can be “exploited for certain parts of conversation for which it is appropriate.”
Ed Lascelles, Partner at AlbionVC, commented: “Conversational AI has evolved significantly since the advent of early chatbots” and noted that OpenDialog has “built and scaled businesses before.”
In fact, this is the second startup for the founding team, who scaled and sold Thoughtonomy, a software automation solution, to Blue Prism in 2019.