Troubleshooting Common Issues With AI Assistants

AI assistants can be incredibly useful for small businesses. Helping to automate workstreams, improve efficiencies and scale up growth. But like any other type of technology, artificial intelligence can go wrong sometimes. This article will take a look at some of the most common problems with AI you’re likely to encounter. Along with a handy downloadable cheat sheet to help you out when it comes to AI troubleshooting.

What are AI challenges?

While AI has huge potential benefits for businesses, there are also some challenges of AI assistants. They use fairly new technology, which means that they’re still developing. They sometimes struggle to interpret complex commands or nuanced requests.

Additionally, AI assistants rely heavily on the quality of the data they’re trained on. So, if that data is out of date, inaccurate or has missing information, then the output from the AI assistant will also be out of date, inaccurate and with missing information.

Types of challenges with AI assistants

So, what are some of the most common challenges businesses are likely to face when it comes to AI assistants? They include:

• Incorrect information: AI assistants do sometimes provide false information. This is also known as “AI hallucinations”. It’s thought to be a problem between 3% and 27% of the time. Hallucinations can be caused by poor training data, incorrect assumptions or biases in the data that’s used to train the model.

• Privacy and data security: AI assistants handle sensitive personal and business information. 80% of data experts believe that the use of AI increases security challenges. It’s important to be vigilant about AI security. Take a look at our cybersecurity advice for tips.

• Ethical considerations: AI systems may inadvertently perpetuate biases present in their training data or lack clarity on how decisions are made. For example, an AI-powered CV screening tool that’s trained on historical data may inadvertently favour candidates from specific demographics.

• Contextual understanding: AI assistants are valuable to businesses because they can carry out tasks faster than many humans. But this can also cause problems. These assistants may struggle with understanding context or nuance. Leading to misunderstandings and inappropriate responses. AI-powered chatbots, for example, may struggle to understand tone. A frustrated user may write a sarcastic message (like “Oh, great – a delay. Thanks for that.”), but the chatbot may interpret it as sincere and respond with “No problem, we’re glad we can help!”. This is likely to lead to even more frustration for the user.

• Integration challenges: Integrating AI assistants with existing systems can be difficult. Leading to compatibility issues or disruptions in workflows.

• Lack of personalisation: AI assistants don’t always do well at personalising responses and content. Ensuring a personalised and responsive user experience may require ongoing training of the assistant.

• Difficulty following conversations: AI assistants may struggle with conversational context. Some AI assistants do well with simple commands but may find it difficult to process multi-turn conversations. If a user refers to an earlier comment, for example, it may be misinterpreted or misunderstood. For example, in customer service scenarios, a user might provide their order number, and then later ask to update the shipping address. If the AI can’t recall the order number or context, it will ask for the same information again.

• User frustration: If a chatbot doesn’t satisfactorily answer a user question, the user may quickly become frustrated – or they may prefer to speak to a human straight away.

All of these challenges can lead to user frustrations. As well as creating the need for human intervention to fact-check the assistant’s output or tweak the prompt. And since businesses are using AI to create operational efficiencies and cut down on manual work, these challenges could be costing organisations time and money.

How to overcome challenges with AI assistants

Fortunately, the majority of these AI challenges can be solved. Although, it may require some work on your part.

• Fact checking : While AI assistants like ChatGPT can speed up your writing, mistakes can be made. Always verify the accuracy of the information provided.

• Misinterpretations: Improve your prompts to reduce the chances of misunderstandings. Be specific and clear. Provide as much context as possible to increase the assistant’s understanding of requests.

• Misunderstandings: If the response from the AI seems incorrect or is unclear, ask follow-up questions. This can help to clarify what’s needed and ensure a more accurate response.

• Difficulty integrating: If you’re having trouble integrating AI assistants with your existing systems, make use of APIs to connect the two. Helping everything to work more efficiently together.

• Security concerns: Data security is always a consideration with AI assistants. Make sure that you regularly audit your suite of tools. Take steps to address any vulnerabilities.

• Chatbot frustrations: One survey found that 50% of consumers feel frustrated at their interactions with chatbots. Nearly 40% said their interactions are negative. It’s crucial to ensure you have a mechanism to reroute frustrated users to human agents.

AI assistants can be really useful for businesses, but they do come with a unique set of challenges including factual accuracy and misunderstandings. It’s usually easy to rectify these issues. Although you may need to do some extra work to fact-check the assistant’s output.

Download our troubleshooting tips below to get started and learn more about AI and how it can be used to grow your small business.

Find out more about how AI can help your business and get 1-2-1 support by speaking to one of our V-Hub Digital Advisers.