A chatbot is software that responds to customer messages using pre-set rules orscripted decision trees, matching what a customer types to the closest availableresponse rather than reasoning about the situation.
Chatbots and AI agents get used as interchangeable terms, but they workdifferently and deliver different outcomes. A chatbot is limited to the paths it wasbuilt for. Ask it something outside that script and it either fails or routes to ahuman. This is why traditional chatbots are associated with deflection, pointingcustomers toward a knowledge base article and hoping the question resolves itself,rather than resolution, actually completing the task the customer needed done.
Chatbot performance is typically tracked through containment rate(the percentage of conversations that don't escalate to a human) and fallback rate (howoften the chatbot can't match an input to a known response). A high containment ratedoesn't always mean success. If customers are leaving frustrated rather than resolved,containment is hiding a problem rather than solving one.