AI Chatbot

An AI chatbot answers enquiries on a website or in a messenger using a language model - unlike the classic, rule-based chatbot that only knows predefined paths. It understands freely worded requests, asks follow-up questions, draws on stored company knowledge and formulates answers itself rather than replaying canned text blocks. The line to the AI agent is fluid: once the system also takes actions (booking a meeting, writing a lead into the CRM), it is better described as an agent.

Its behaviour is governed by a system prompt: role, tone, permitted topics, escalation rules. Add to that the knowledge base - usually your own website content, FAQs and internal documents the model accesses via retrieval. Both matter more for quality than the model itself: an AI chatbot without a maintained knowledge base sounds eloquent and still gets things wrong.

The lead side is what makes it interesting for marketing: a well-configured AI chatbot does not just answer questions - it recognises buying signals, asks about budget and timeline, and hands qualified enquiries to humans with the full conversation context. That turns the support widget into a sales channel that works nights and weekends.