In this Channel Partners TV interview, I spoke with Inbenta CTO Merlin Bise about how customer expectations are changing around AI.

Inbenta is an AI-powered customer experience company. Bise said customers are looking to consolidate around AI products that are proven to work rather than what he calls “gimmick AI companies.”

“Customers will tolerate a little bit of friction with AI, but they don't like it, and they'll simply walk away if the product doesn't perform,” he said. “We want to have a real conversation with customers and say, ‘Why are you paying for all this complexity when a simpler approach will solve your problem?’

Bise said Inbenta’s AI platform provides simple automation, more powerful trigger-based automation, and then truly sophisticated intelligent automation where the system understands the flow of the conversation and acts on its own. Those layers of automation covers the needs of most businesses.

“Companies are trying to pick one vendor — maybe two at most — that can handle their AI tasks,” he said. “They're getting away from the gimmick AI companies, or the organizations that gave away free chatbots but weren't really in that space at the start of the LLM boom.”

Merlin Bise

Bise said while these are still early days of AI, the technology is transforming rapidly.

“We're still in the first inning of AI,” he said. “AI is changing faster than any of us would believe. The phase of ‘everybody can do AI, and that makes it good’ is largely over. Now, the companies that are in it for the long game are really starting to take advantage of the technology and do genuinely impressive things. And our new customers are reflecting that — they'll ask, ‘Can you do this other use case? Can you do that one?’ Because they have confidence in what we're delivering and they want to pull back from three, four, or five vendors and consolidate. Most people simply want to manage one vendor.”

Watch the full video at the top of the page.