March 10th, 2023, Clifton Mark
From Hal 9000 to the more recent M3gan, general AI has often been the stuff of Hollywood nightmares. The more modest customer-service chatbot has more often been the subject of comedy, with the punchline being they provide more rage than service. With new advances in AI and increasingly sophisticated bots, are attitudes changing? In a recent global survey, YouGov asked over 19000 consumers in 18 markets which products they thought chatbots could actually be useful when shopping online for.
Audiences are not convinced that our chatbot future has arrived. When asked which kinds of products chatbots might be helpful with, “none” was by far the most popular answer at 29%, followed by “don’t know” at 20%. That said, a minority of customers do think that AI could be useful in customer service. The largest proportion (16%) believe this is true about mobile phones and electronics, whereas 12% of consumers believe that chatbots could help them choose and order takeout food.
While the global belief in takeout chatbots is a modest 12%, this conceals significant variation between markets. Nearly a quarter of UAE consumers (23%) think chatbots could be useful and nearly a fifth of consumers in India (21%) and Mexico (19%). Asian markets such as Hong Kong (16%), China (15%) and Singapore (14%) are more likely than the global average to find takeout bots useful. It’s worth noting that Mexican and Indian audiences are representative of the urban population rather than the nation, and that China, Indonesia, and Hong Kong use samples that are representative of online audiences. Bot-friendly responses may be more typical of these audiences.
With the exception of Spain (12%), the European and North American markets plus Australia are all below the global average. France 4% is least trusting of takeout chatbots, followed by Sweden, Great Britain and the US, all at 7%. At least in Europe and North America, the era of chatbots has not yet arrived. Perhaps this will change when they can tell consumers what they feel like eating.
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Methodology: YouGov Surveys: Serviced provide quick survey results from nationally representative or targeted audiences in multiple markets. The data is based on surveys of adults aged 18+ years in 18 markets with sample sizes varying between 431 and 1,572 for each market. All surveys were conducted online in December 2022. Data from each market uses a nationally representative sample apart from Mexico and India, which use urban representative samples, and China, Indonesia and Hong Kong, which use online representative samples. Learn more about YouGov Surveys: Serviced.