This chapter is for the PM who's been asked to "add a chatbot" or "build us a copilot" and now has to decide: is chat the right interface, or just the easiest one to ship? We'll cover where it works, where it dies quietly, and when chat is a genuine product feature versus a lazy wrapper around search.
Where Chat Works
Conversational interfaces shine on triage and scale — simple, repetitive, high-volume stuff.
Vodafone UK's TOBi handles over a million interactions monthly with 70% first-contact resolution. Cost per query drops from £10+ to pennies. Eye-oo resolved 82% of support issues automatically with €177K extra revenue from cart recovery. Monday.com embedded Kapa.ai in docs — 10x engagement, 30 minutes saved per query, zero extra headcount.
Where Chat Fails Silently
The scary part: confident wrongness that users don't catch until it hurts.
Air Canada, 2022. A grieving customer asked the chatbot about bereavement fares. The bot invented a policy that didn't exist. He booked, got denied, sued, won. Tribunal ruled: "The chatbot is a tool of the airline — it is responsible for its representations."
McDonald's Olivia hiring bot (2025): applicants reported loops, ghosting, bizarre questions. A Reddit thread went viral. Classic case of shipping without human-in-the-loop monitoring.