Inside Volvo’s AI chatbot on WhatsApp

As part of a larger push to bring AI into opportunities for advertisers, Meta is helping brands create chatbots that combine developments in virtual assistant technology with the reach offered through its popular messaging apps. One such brand is Volvo, which launched a chatbot on WhatsApp earlier this month. The automaker has centered the effort around helping consumers learn more about its new electric vehicle, EX30. The bot can provide details on the car, relay updated information on price and availability, coordinate reservations and answer other miscellaneous questions. While its focus may be simple, the assistant required roughly six months of development—including a nearly two-month launch delay—during which Volvo worked alongside Meta to fine-tune its personality, safety parameters and understanding of company data. The process was described in detail to Ad Age by Volvo’s Alexander Dramountanis, offering brands a behind-the-scenes look at the opportunities and challenges in building a custom AI chatbot. “There's a lot of manual labor to actually make sure that we test it and that the consumer does get a seamless experience,” said Dramountanis, Volvo’s U.S. director of brand strategy, media and planning. Speak like a Swede A key feature that Meta is enabling for brands is the ability to train an AI to reflect a brand’s personality, thanks to the great leaps in innovation that generative AI has made in the past year. Wendy’s, for example, could feasibly customize a chatbot to roast users as it does on social media, a marketing expert previously told Ad Age. For a brand like Volvo, whose voice is not as pronounced as Wendy’s, teaching an AI to assume its personality is more difficult. Using a Volvo customer care specialist as inspiration, the automaker began tweaking the base personality of the large language model (LLM) from Quiq, a third-party conversational AI and business messaging company. The process consisted of assessing the bot’s entire decision tree, or map of possible responses, and selecting which bubbles of language to use. Early versions of the bot were too casual in the way they communicated, said Dramountanis, using greetings such as, “Hey, what’s up, dude?” Given that customers would ideally engage with the bot for a host of reasons, including irritations with the product or in response to an actual problem, Volvo wanted it to sound more professional and polished—echoing “typical Swedish,” Dramountanis said. (Volvo is based in Sweden.) An optimal greeting, which the bot eventually learned, is “How can I help you today?” To ensure that its voice was aligned with that of the brand, the automaker involved the corporate communications team, which typically applies the same vigilance to traditional brand materials, such as advertising and press releases. Tweaking tonality will be a challenge for other brands, said Dramountanis, but it’s one of the more important details to get right. No consumer wants to speak with a bot that sounds like one, especially in a world that now boasts humanlike platforms such as ChatGPT. As Volvo developed the bot’s personality, another requirement was to set its limitations. Such guardrails are meant to deter one of the most looming brand safety concerns around generative AI, namely, its tendency to speak out of turn. These so-called “hallucinations” have landed tech companies in hot water, which means that brands that use these systems are also at risk. See our Year in Review stories here Volvo’s assessment of its decision tree included choosing which questions were fair game to answer and which ones would trigger an “exit point,” when the bot would decline a response or offer to hand off the user to a human customer care specialist. The number of possible questions stemming from the sheer size of the decision tree was the main reason Volvo and Meta delayed the launch of the bot by nearly two months. At this point, Dramountanis said, the bot has been programmed to retrieve data purely on the EX30 vehicle, and will abstain from speaking on topics that require other data sources. This means that even potentially helpful information, such as how a competitor’s EV stacks up to Volvo’s, is off-limits. However, the bot does have some ability to answer abstract questions, said Dramountanis. For example, in response to being asked, “Why should I buy an electric vehicle,” it explains the benefits to the environment and the lower operating costs associated without boasting about the specific advantages of the EX30. It will even defend climate change when pressed, stating that “belief in climate change is not simply a matter of opinion, but rather a scientific consensus based on extensive research and evidence.” It would not speak on the degree to which humans appear to be causing it, though. Another challenge, Dramountanis said, is the need to continually update the bot with new information. This is where the AI’s ability to read company data is crucial, because metrics such as pricing, availability and delivery dates are always changing. Volvo’s solution has been to establish a linkage between the bot and the brand’s website. While a new internal governance process is now needed to ensure that the bot is pulling the most recent data, as long as that linkage is preserved, the bot should be able to keep consumers up to date, said Dramountanis. More news: How Trivago used AI to halve its production timeline Starting the conversation Part of Meta’s value proposition for its AI bot initiatives is that brands will be able to place them inside some of the most popular messaging apps in the world. The tech giant is offering integrations with both WhatsApp and Messenger, although Volvo was not approached with an opportunity to activate on the latter, Dramountanis said. An advantage of WhatsApp is that many of its roughly 2 billion active users are international. Volvo is particularly hoping to engage with younger consumers and Hispanic consumers, said Dramountanis. One point of friction, however, is that the bot speaks only English. While generative AI has proven that it can be polylingual, Dramountanis cited concerns around mistranslation, which could hamper the brand’s ability to convey useful and accurate information. Another potential impasse relates to the data that Volvo can access. Messages on WhatsApp are encrypted, meaning that the automaker will not be able to see the specific questions users are asking the bot. This may not have been the case had Volvo created the bot inside an owned platform, such as its website. Super Bowl commercials Tracking the latest brand and agency plans Enter here Still, the brand will be able to collect more general data on how users are engaging with the bot, such as click-through rates from ads, as well as some topic trends, a Volvo spokesperson confirmed. Up to this point, Meta had mostly played the role of advisor, answering Volvo’s questions and ensuring the pipes were connected through the AI system. But its most active contribution has been to support the bot’s media strategy, which includes serving ads on Facebook and Instagram that will be the main point of entry for most users. “The typical thing is to serve ads that [link] to your website, but for us to have ‘Chat now on WhatsApp’ is a new call to action that will hopefully get people to be like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’” Dramountanis said. More AI news: ChatGPT—a year in review Volvo is paying for ads that will run through the end of the year, though Dramountanis declined to specify costs—either for the ad campaign or the development of the bot itself. However, he did explain that the brand’s current strategy is short-term: It will test the bot through the first quarter of 2024, at which time it will assess how to proceed. This may result in expanding the bot’s knowledge to include other vehicles or ending the experiment. “We can decide how long we want to keep it,” Dramountanis said. “We’ll learn very fast if maybe this wasn’t a great experience.” ~ ~ ~CLARIFICATION: Volvo’s chatbot is not part of Meta’s AI chatbot marketing program. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs

Inside Volvo’s AI chatbot on WhatsApp

Featured Stories