Considering how incredible the combination of Artificial Intelligence and business development is, it won’t be surprising to anticipate the modern business industry capitalising more on chatbots in the days to come.

Since the moment chatbots came into being, the world-over tech-enthusiasts have gone gaga over it, for all the right reasons. A chatterbot is a new-age magician that can transform every aspect of our lives with the sweep of its magic wand.

Today, the impacts of chatbots have percolated down to the industry of vendor management as well. In a quest to thrive and excel, the vendor management industry is trying to explore the unbound potential of AI as well as chatbots.

However, it’s difficult to develop a heavy-duty chatbot, which would flourish the fields of vendor management. A bot for dealing with vendor management should own the following capabilities. Take a look:

• Connectivity and accordance with different messaging platforms such as Skype, Facebook messenger, and the likes.
• NLP or Natural Language Processing for understanding what most of the users would ask or type.
• Context as well as dialogue management for continuing an interaction intelligently and helping users to communicate with a chatbot.
• Connectivity with an external system so a bot can take essential actions or offer relevant information on behalf of the users.
• Hybrid UI response to help users continues with the interaction.
• Business logic and intelligence as these are the most crucial characteristics of a bot associated with vendor management.

While the platform vendors can offer SDK or Software Development Kits of their own to develop chatbots for their platforms, the SDKs have limited capabilities. Take, for instance, the bots built on SDKs are unable to connect with several other messaging platforms.

This apart, these SDKs are incapable of providing numerous capacities required. Given the fact that there are already legions of messaging platforms with chatbot capacities like Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Slack, Kik, Skype, etc., building a cross-platform bot is a tad difficult.

Chatbot Services and Frameworks

Every problem or mistake rather provides a start-up with manifold opportunities to excel and thrive. Difficulties in building chatbots have prompted start-up organizations to grow in the particular field of vendor management.

There are mainly three kinds of chatbot start-ups including chatbot framework vendors, chatbot vendors and chatbot development System Integrators, which are currently running.

Chatbot framework vendors hint at technology-oriented start-ups giving rise to different capabilities including, dialogue management, natural language processing, and connectivity along with external systems. Some of these vendors might offer different options to build hybrid UIs as well.

The Core Benefits of Chatbots in Vendor Management

The total numbers of chatbot framework vendors are growing with each passing day. What’s more interesting is that these vendors have got a variety of approaches and backgrounds. Chatbots can spell truckloads of benefits in streamlining vendor management. Some of these impacts are dug out down below –

• Chatbots can work wonders in dealing with all cold calls. An advanced chatbot can interact with the vendor managers or suppliers sans any human assistance.
• Bots can deal with low-value transactions with utmost proficiency. When a user would ask a bot to make a purchase, it will leave no stones unturned for making it happen.
• A chatbot is capable of managing different paperwork, providing or chasing orders, handling payments and invoices. The best part is that each of these tasks could be accomplished without any human intervention.
• Now, it will no longer be a tough deal to find a well-efficient supplier, all thanks to the advanced chatbots. If you are looking to find an array of efficient suppliers, then counting on chatbot will seal the deal. Upon making a thorough research on the current market and asking a few queries to the suppliers, a bot can create a short list of efficient suppliers with ease.
• Chatbots are capable of running as well as scoring tenders. There should be less-complicated rules, which a bot can easily abide by.
• Performance management and supplier monitoring could be done by a bot as well. The relevant KPIs should be recorded and performance issues must be raised to the proper stuff for enabling a bot to accomplish these tasks.
• If there is any change in pricing, then a chatbot can share the relevant information to the buyers.
• Every kind of pricing for some certain products can be handled by a chatbot running e-auctions regularly minus any human assistance or interaction.
• When a chatbot steps in, the level of human assistance or interaction can be minimized leading to lower expenses internally and with the suppliers.
• The most exciting part about inculcating a chatbot in vendor management is that it can take away many mundane and monotonous aspects of the job.  It can also give rise to numerous strategic bits, which humans are equipped to handle.
• The most frequently asked queries about the process of vendor management could be resolved by a chatbot.
• The bots are able to provide invoice related status or information to the suppliers sans requiring them to contact the help desk.

There are a number of chatbot vendors, who emphasize selling bots for some specific platforms to enterprise customers.

It capacitates chatbots to integrate with Slack for streamlining the processes of project management, software development, and team collaboration workflows. Additionally, some mobile app development hubs have seized the opportunity to build customized bots and buckled up for providing chatbot development services

Final Words

Looking at the increasing popularity of chatbots, it won’t be wrong to anticipate that almost every aspect of our lives would go under the sway of the artificially intelligent bots in the years to come.  Every business will start relying on chatbots on multiple messaging platforms to meet different goals.

There are opportunities galore mainly for three kinds of vendors in the eco-system. These include chatbot vendors, chatbot framework vendors and chatbot development Sis.

In the upcoming days, the entrepreneurs are expected to leverage chatbots as parts of their external and internal workflows using different platforms. However, these bots are required to be created impeccably, as an ill-designed bot could take a hit on the overall reputation of a business.

Sumit Kumar, Co- Founder & CEO, Gravitas AI

www.gravitas.ai