Chatbot or automated flow? Where generative AI actually helps

"Support automation" has become synonymous with "AI chatbot" — but a good chunk of real use cases work better (and cheaper) with a simple automated flow, no language model involved at all.

FAQs, appointment confirmations, sending invoices, order status: that's a fixed decision flow, solved with traditional automation (rules, queues, integrations) — faster to implement, more predictable and cheaper to maintain than generative AI.

Generative AI comes in when the conversation is genuinely open-ended: understanding the intent behind a freely written message, answering questions that don't follow a fixed script, or screening a conversation before handing it off to a human. In those cases, it solves what a decision tree wouldn't handle well.

Before hiring "an AI chatbot", it's worth figuring out which of the two problems you actually have — because the wrong solution costs more and delivers a worse experience than the right one.