What should a Chatbot have: A Practical Checklist
AI chatbots can transform customer service and reduce operational costs, but only when they’re built with the right safeguards. Too often, providers prioritise speed and flashy demonstrations over governance, creating systems that pose unnecessary risks in regulated environments. Here are six areas where chatbot providers commonly cut corners, and why they matter. 1. Clear Scope, […]
Why Most AI Pilots Fail – And What To Do Differently
A reflection following the BioIntegrates panel: AI-Driven Alliances: Collaborating Beyond the Possible The Number Nobody Wants to Talk About Last week I sat on a panel with some of the ambitious AI-driven biotech companies working in the UK today — teams building AI to screen a billion drug molecules in hours, design precision medicines for […]
Right-Sizing Project Management: A Practical Framework for Small Agencies
How do you know how much process and documentation are enough to keep a project on track (without burying your team and clients in overhead)? This is, genuinely, one of the harder problems in project management for small agencies. It took me years to get it roughly right, and I’m still calibrating. I’ve been managing […]
A Client Guide to Testing Your Chatbot Before it Goes Live
This isn’t a developer’s guide. It’s a practical checklist for teams commissioning or launching a chatbot. We encourage our clients to test their chatbot properly throughout the development process. The gap between “it works” and “it works well for our customers” is where chatbot projects either succeed or become expensive mistakes. We’ve tested that the […]
Charity Chatbots Under the Microscope: Evaluating Reasoning, Tone, Structure, and Safety
When we tested six charity chatbots across nine technical capability categories, we weren’t just measuring impressive features. We were asking a crucial question: How sophisticated does your chatbot need to be, to resolve your user’ problems. The answer depends entirely on context. A simple scripted chatbot might be perfect for a museum’s opening hours. That […]
Chatbots in industry: From fraud prevention to legal support and charity triage
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a futuristic concept reserved for sci-fi enthusiasts or tech labs. It is embedded in our daily lives. Among the most visible manifestations of AI are chatbots and other AI-driven tools, which have found their way into banking, legal services, healthcare, and beyond. Yet, despite their widespread adoption, the way […]
AI autonomy guided by safe innovation
AI autonomy, safety, and the responsibility of serving users who need it most When building AI systems for vulnerable populations, every design decision carries weight. Too much control and you lose the naturalness that makes conversations helpful. Too little and you risk responses that could genuinely harm. We’ve spent years building conversational systems for charities […]
Evaluating Chatbots: Technical Rigour and Human Experience
Chatbots are everywhere now. They answer customer questions, help you book tickets, and even act like digital assistants. They’re powered by large language models, which is just a fancy way of saying computers trained on lots of text so they can “talk” like us. Making a chatbot is not the hard part anymore. Despite their […]
RAG as Your Anchor: Grounding Chatbots in Trusted Data
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) combines information retrieval with generative AI, allowing systems to provide more accurate, up-to-date responses. This approach is especially valuable as large language models (LLMs) are limited by the static data they were trained on. This is where RAG steps in. By pulling updated, trusted data from your organisations knowledge bases. RAG […]
How AI Features Are Changing the Game for UI/UX AI Design
AI is everywhere, and design is no exception. From speeding up workflows to generating content, artificial intelligence is changing the design process. For those working in UI/UX AI design, it brings a mix of opportunities and challenges. But despite the rapid growth, AI isn’t replacing designers anytime soon. Instead, it’s becoming a powerful assistant—one that […]