Artificial intelligence (AI) continually improves all aspects of online operations. From customer service and data analysis to research and writing, there are plenty of tools to help streamline the process. Adoption is now mainstream, with around 78% of global companies currently using AI, and 83% saying it’s a top priority in their business plans
One popular tool to use is AI chatbots. For example, a customer service AI chatbot can assist your team — and your customers. A search engine chatbot will help you get more out of your research experience.
This page will break down what AI chatbots are, how to use AI to boost productivity, discuss your different AI options, and find the best fit for your business.
Key takeaways
AI chatbots can streamline customer service, content creation, and internal workflows—freeing up sales and marketing teams to focus on high-impact work.
Top-performing tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and TeamAI offer versatile functionality, but the right chatbot depends on your goals, budget, and integration needs.
Using AI bots for tasks like lead qualification, FAQs, or content drafting can boost productivity and improve customer experience at scale.
An AI chatbot is a computer program that simulates conversation with human beings using natural language processing (NLP). With NLP, these tools can understand human language and text, enabling them to mimic conversations with users.
Choose an AI chatbot that engages visitors, captures leads, and books meetings 24/7!
Nutshell’s AI chatbot is your always-on AI assistant built directly into your CRM and giving your team more time to focus on mission critical activities. Set it up in just a few clicks to instantly answer website visitor questions, automatically capture lead data, and seamlessly book more appointments.
What is the best chatbot out there? Each chatbot option has unique features, benefits, and uses. Depending on how you want to use them, you can find a tool best suited to your needs.
We’ve broken down the 29 different AI chatbot options into different categories to show the range of chatbot options available.
These are AI chatbots that have multiple functions, so you can use them for general cases.
TeamAI
TeamAI is a business AI solution that lets teams store and chat with thousands of documents, share prompts with the entire team, and connect to third-party endpoints to automate workflows, all in one collaborative workspace.
TeamAI also combines multiple models, such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta, and allows teams to create custom plugins. Need to see how a specific persona would react to your prompt? With TeamAI’s custom assistants, you can chat with the AI assistant aligned with your unique goals and tone.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is the leading AI chatbot on the market. This tool allows you to have human-like conversations and generate text for any purpose. You can ask it questions, use it for research, or joke around with it.
ChatGPT gets its information from a database. When you enter a prompt, the large language model (LLM) creates a response based on the information it has. That’s how it can answer questions and communicate like a person.
You’ve likely seen others online using ChatGPT, whether to highlight its features or flaws. For example, ChatGPT can’t automate workflows for teams, a major consideration for companies looking to leverage AI for greater efficiency. Regardless, ChatGPT is an all-encompassing chatbot that you can use for varying purposes.
Gemini
Gemini is Google’s AI chatbot. Much like ChatGPT, you can enter any prompt and receive a relevant response. It can generate text, translate languages, write content, and more, depending on how you want to use it.
Unlike ChatGPT, Gemini pulls its information from the web, so there is a better chance of having up-to-date, accurate information.
And since Gemini is a Google product, the chatbot works seamlessly in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and other Google solutions.
Microsoft Bing Chat
Bing Chat is a feature in Microsoft Edge that lets you chat with an AI bot while browsing the web. If you want to ask questions, compare topics, or even rewrite text, you can do so without leaving your browser. Think of this chatbot as the ultimate assistant for helping you search online.
Jasper AI Chat
Jasper is another generic AI tool that lets you enter queries and chat back and forth. This tool is similar to Gemini and ChatGPT, except you have to pay a subscription fee for full access. Jasper also supports 30+ languages.
Jasper AI also offers an API for you to add its AI services to your platform.
Claude
Claude is a business-oriented AI chatbot that lets companies chat and interact with AI safely. This chatbot can help companies with customer service, legal, coaching, and more. They also offer a regular chatbot that you can use for general education purposes.
The Claude for Business option is ideal for companies that want to integrate an efficient tool into their workflow.
Deep AI Chat
Deep AI Chat is an overarching AI tool that lets you generate images, play games, research, and more. The chatbot style makes it easy to use all the AI features with an accessible interface. Since Deep AI has more than one tool, you can enjoy a full collection of AI services at a low price.
Research and learning
These AI chatbots help you research new topics or learn more about a particular subject.
Perplexity
Perplexity is a knowledge-focused AI chatbot that’s great for research and idea generation. This tool is like ChatGPT, but it is more accurate, especially with text analysis. This tool is also suited for speech-to-text transcription and sentiment analysis.
Poe
Poe is safe AI question-and-answer tool that gives you answers to your pressing questions. It has a seamless user interface and experience, making it easy to research and learn new information. Poe also uses a variety of chatbots that make it more efficient for searches. Poe is a secure AI platform developed by the reputable company Quora. One issue with Poe however is that you can’t use it to create plugins.
Khanmigo
Khanmigo is a tutoring tool from Khan Academy. Learners can use this chatbot to ask questions and build their knowledge on various subjects, while teachers can use it as an AI assistant. This tool is great for those wanting to learn a new subject or those in education.
Customer service
If you’re looking to improve your business’s customer service, these tools can help.
Nutshell Chat
Nutshell Chat pairs an AI-powered chatbot with live Web chat, so you can run bot-first support and bring in humans when it counts. Train the bot on your website and PDFs to give on-brand answers, capture details, and hand off to your team—with everything saved in your CRM.
When visitors are ready, the bot can open Nutshell Scheduler right inside the chat to confirm a time and automatically create a lead with full context for follow-up. You can also use live chat on its own or alongside the AI bot to provide fast answers 24/7 without losing the human touch.
Dialogflow
Dialogflow is Google’s tool that allows you to build AI chatbots and add them to your website or mobile app. With Dialogflow, you can use the generative AI agent to help your users through conversation and improve their experience with your site.
With Dialogflow, you also have end-to-end management that gives you more control over your chatbot.
Intercom Fin
Fin is another customer support bot that you can install to help with customer challenges and questions. Fin uses advanced AI language models to deal with complex questions and provide human answers.
This tool gets its answers from multiple sources to improve accuracy for customers. You can also create custom answers to help with accuracy.
Watsonx Assistant
Wastonx Assistant is a personal customer service assistant powered by IBM Watson. This tool aims to help businesses improve their customer service approach to give users a better, more satisfying experience.
This bot integrates with many different channels and tools to give you more control over operations. You even get to generate the voice your bot has when chatting with customers.
Zendesk
Zendesk is another customer service bot that you can customize to help your unique audience. This tool has numerous features for businesses, including ticketing, voice integration, messaging, and more. You can be as hands-on as you like while leveraging AI.
Writing help
These chatbots help you write compelling content for any purpose.
ZenoChat
ZenoChat is a tool you can use to help you write content tailored to your style and needs. You can build up your knowledge base and create personas to optimize each output. This tool makes it easier than ever to write content for a variety of channels.
Chatsonic
Chatsonic is an AI chatbot specific for content creation. They help teams optimize their workflow with specialized content. You can create content for search engine optimization (SEO), social media, blogs, and more, all with a few simple steps.
Koalachat
Koala Chat is another content creation tool that makes it easy to crank out content for any use. You get full control of the content, so you can edit and improve it right in the platform. If you want help with outlining or drafting full sections, this tool is a great choice.
You can check out the sample articles on their site to get an idea of what to expect before you try it.
Coding
If you work with code, these tools can help you streamline some of the process.
GitHub Copilot
GitHub Copilot is an intuitive chatbot that helps programmers and developers create code. You can use the Copilot when looking for a bug or trying to figure out how to design a new feature. This tool simplifies the coding process and lightens some of the workload.
Amazon Code Whisperer
Amazon Code Whisperer is a coding tool from Amazon that makes it easy to bypass tedious coding tasks. This tool is trained on billions of lines of code, so you can rely on it for simple and complex operations. It also helps with security and integrates with common tools, like Python, Java, and more.
Workflow tools
These AI chatbots are best for people or teams who want to optimize their workflow.
Chat by Copy.ai
Chat by Copy.ai is a marketing and sales-oriented chatbot that helps teams get more done quickly. You can use this tool to create content, build and integrate a style guide for your brand, and scale your content operations.
Unlike ChatGPT, for example, Chat by Copy.ai was built for marketing, making it a more industry-specific tool.
Zapier AI Chat
Zapier lets your company build and integrate a chatbot with zero coding on your end. You can use this simple tool to add a chatbot to your website for any reason, whether that’s customer service or research.
The options are endless with Zapier, and they even offer templates for you to get a head start.
ChatSpot
ChatSpot is an AI-powered assistant that combines ChatGPT’s power with your customer relationship management (CRM) platform to help with your workflow. You can use this chatbot to help with sales prospecting, content creation, and even SEO.
For fun
Looking for a fun AI chatbot to explore and try out? Here are a few you can check out.
Kuki AI
Kuki AI is an AI chatbot that is meant for entertainment. The AI interface is modeled after a person — Kuki — who is available to chat with for free. If you want to have fun and chat with an AI brain, this is a great option.
HuggingChat
Hugging Chat is a routine chatbot that you can talk to, ask questions, and learn from. There are plenty of these chatbots around from different companies, but each one differs in its setup and capabilities.
Hugging Chat is not totally for fun — you can use it to code games or create content ideas.
YouChat
YouChat is another standard chatbot powered by GPT. You can get answers for any topic and be as descriptive as you want in the prompt. If you want to try out a different tool from ChatGPT, YouChat is a great choice.
Character AI
Character AI is a creative AI tool that lets you create personalities with AI, and then chat with them. There are tons of characters that exist already for you to chat with as well, some with specific purposes (like fortune-telling.)
If you want to create a character and see how they might interact, this tool is an excellent option.
Pi
Pi is a personal AI chatbot that exists for entertainment. This chatbot has a super simple interface, and you can use it to have a conversation with a friendly bot. It’s a basic tool, but definitely entertaining.
Replika
Replika is a generative AI chatbot app that relies on your answers to build its neural network. The more you chat with Replika, the smarter it becomes, and the more you can chat about. It essentially creates a fake personality for you to chat and talk with.
Why use an AI chatbot?
For businesses, AI chatbots can help with a variety of tasks and help maximize your time and resources. Some reasons to use an AI chatbot include the following:
Boost productivity: AI boosts productivity by automating repetitive tasks, streamlining workflows, and providing quick insights.
Better customer service: Human customer service representatives can’t be available all the time. Having an AI chatbot around to answer questions and guide users can help you provide service around the clock.
More satisfied customers: When customers use a business chatbot, they can get answers quickly and find out more information. You can improve their overall customer experience.
Improved time management: Using chatbots to streamline various processes can help you get more time back in your day. Whether you’re researching to write new content or coding a website, you can save time using chatbots.
What are the benefits of AI chatbots?
The best way to understand the benefits of AI chatbots is to see how other companies use them. Below are four benefits of AI chatbots in different industries, which can give you ideas for how to use them in your organization.
1. Improved customer service
The first example of chatbots is from Columbia Gas of Pennsylvania. Their chatbot helps users with or without an account find out more about the company’s utility services.
This chatbot gives users the option to choose from different topics to start their conversation. They can also enter a phrase to find something more specific. Using this chatbot makes it easier to learn about utility-related issues, like billing, usage, outages, and more.
In that same vein, Oracle has a chatbot that helps users navigate their account and the website. Since this application is so complex and in-depth, the chatbot helps simulate a conversation to answer users’ questions. This can give your support team more time for other tasks, like resolving more complicated issues.
2. Providing mobile assistance
The next use case is Fargo, the chatbot from Wells Fargo. This company created a mobile chatbot to help users with their banking experience:
This chatbot can help with a variety of requests, such as finding account information (routing numbers, for example), searching transactions, sending money, and more.
3. Enhancing the customer experience
Fast, accurate, professional—customers expect more from their experiences with support teams than ever before. A good experience with your support team can make loyal, lifelong customers, while a bad one can result in a bad review or even a lost sale.
Implementing AI chatbots in your support process can help customers find the answers they need more quickly, as they don’t have to wait for human support agents to have time for them.
A compelling example of AI’s impact on business outcomes comes and customer experience is from Klarna. Their AI assistant, powered by OpenAI, handled 2.3 million customer service conversations within its first month, performing the work equivalent of 700 full-time agents.
This led to a 25% drop in repeat inquiries and reduced resolution times to under two minutes, demonstrating how AI chatbots can significantly enhance efficiency and customer satisfaction, with an estimated USD 40 million profit improvement for Klarna in 2024.
Another customer experience improvement example comes via Marriott’s Homes & Villas. The company, in collaboration with Publicis Sapient, developed a generative AI search tool that leverages large language models to understand natural language queries.
This innovation allows customers to find vacation rentals based on preferences and emotions, rather than just location. The tool has significantly improved the search experience, leading to a doubling of users saving properties and guiding marketing efforts with insights from over 40,000 searches.
But what about the customers who would rather not deal with a chatbot? By giving them an option to wait for your support team, you still ensure that they have the experience they want.
4. Marketing and sales
The final use case available is Shopify’s Sidekick AI — an AI chatbot and personal assistant. This feature is available for users who own and operate a Shopify store.
This chatbot is an ideal example of AI for sales. It helps Shopify users complete tasks in their shop, like creating discount codes, generating reports, and coming up with blog post ideas.
Chatbots like these truly function as a virtual sidekick, and they’re emerging in a rapidly expanding market, with global AI valued at about USD 391 billion today and projected to reach USD 1.81 trillion by 2030.
What is the difference between traditional and AI chatbots?
Traditional and AI chatbots have different operating structures and capabilities, which impact the user experience. Both have unique uses and cons to help with different purposes.
Traditional, or rule-based, chatbots are the original style of creating chatbots. These tools are engineered to follow an existing script. They have limited NLP, meaning they can only understand limited phrases and words.
AI chatbots, on the other hand, use NLP and machine learning to have conversations with users. They offer dynamic responses by analyzing the input and creating an appropriate response based on the conversation.
If you were selecting a chatbot for business use, you could use a traditional chatbot for limited interactions, like online ordering. However, for customer service questions, AI might be a better choice since it’s more dynamic.
What should I look for in an AI chatbot?
So, what should you look for in an AI chatbot? Below are three factors to consider:
1. Accuracy
For a chatbot to be effective, it must be accurate. The whole point of a chatbot is to save time and get answers fast. If there is a risk of misinformation, that will lead to more frustrated customers.
Make sure you pick a chatbot that delivers consistent results over time, and always check the information you get. Chatbots can still make mistakes!
2. Ease of use
If a chatbot is hard to use, it will drive people away. You want an option that has limited requirements, like subscriptions or account activation. Choosing a simple option can save you time and money in the long run. And the payoff is real, with around 4 in 5 people (80%) will use chatbots when offered—so removing friction helps you capture that demand.
3. Privacy
In the age of big data, data privacy is a major consideration for any business. Whether you’re using an AI chatbot to generate marketing content, summarize meeting notes, or handle customer support requests, carefully consider how different tools use the data you input.
Does the tool you’re considering use the data you input to train AI tools further? Will the company sell your data to third parties? Be sure to carefully read the privacy policy of every chatbot you’re considering. And if you’re ever unsure how your data could be used, it’s always best to take a cautious approach and refrain from inputting sensitive personal or business information.
4. Chat experience
The last factor to consider is the chat experience, which directly affects users. A simple format makes the chatbot more accessible to everyone, like you’re using a messenger service. Some chatbots are a bit more complex, but in general, you want a simple choice that is easy to use.
Which AI chatbot is best to use?
The chatbot you use depends on your needs, industry, and budget. There is no one right answer for the best AI chatbot — that will vary by business.
Ask yourself the following questions to help you choose the best chatbot:
What will you use the chatbot for?
How much do you want to spend on a chatbot?
How often will you use the chatbot?
Do you need multiple uses for your chatbot?
Are you integrating a chatbot as a tool?
Those factors considered, here’s a quick breakdown of the best AI chatbots for different business needs:
The best AI chatbot for…
is….
General business needs
TeamAI
Resource-backed research
Perplexity
Teams using Google Workspace
Gemini
Customer support
Nutshell Chat
Content creation
Chatsonic
Technical business needs
Claude
Coding
GitHub Copilot
General marketing tasks
Chat by Copy.ai
FAQs about AI chatbots
What is an AI chatbot?
An AI chatbot is software that uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand questions and generate human-like responses. Businesses use them for customer support, sales enablement, research, writing, and workflow automation.
How do I choose the right chatbot?
To choose the right AI chatbot for your business, you should consider the following:
Define use cases (support, sales, content, research)
Check integrations (CRM, help desk, Google/Microsoft suites)
Evaluate security/compliance needs
Confirm knowledge-base support
Consider languages, tone control, admin/analytics
Align pricing with expected usage and team size
Can chatbots connect to my tools and use my content?
Yes. Look for native integrations or APIs (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, Intercom, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365) and features to ingest documents, sync FAQs, or ground answers in your knowledge base.
What are the main categories of AI chatbots?
Common AI chatbot categories include the following:
Customer service bots (e.g., Dialogflow, Intercom Fin)
Writing assistants
Coding copilots
Workflow/automation tools
Entertainment/fun chatbots
What security and compliance features matter most?
The most important AI chatbot security and compliance features include:
Encryption in transit/at rest
SSO/MFA and role-based access control
Data residency options and audit logs
Ability to disable training on your data
Compliance attestations (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001)
How much do AI chatbots cost, and how do I measure ROI?
AI chatbot costs range from free tiers to per-seat or usage-based pricing. Track ROI via resolution/deflection rate, AHT, cost per resolution, lead conversion speed, content time saved, CSAT/NPS, and agent satisfaction.
Pair your AI chatbot with a robust CRM
Choose a CRM with a built‑in AI chatbot. A chatbot can power research, support, and capture leads. But the real impact comes when every conversation flows into the same place you manage your sales.
Nutshell’s AI Chatbot is part of your Nutshell CRM, right alongside our live Web chat tool. With it, you can engage visitors 24/7, qualify them in real time, collect contact info, and hand information off to a human rep without losing context.
Keep the momentum going with Nutshell’s range of AI tools, including:
AI agents: Nutshell’s AI Agents are native, context-aware copilots—lead research agent, email sequence writer, sales pipeline designer, and sales objection coach—that turn revenue tasks into quick chats, so your team works smarter and closes deals faster.
AI meeting and call summarization: Nutshell’s built-in AI summarizes every call and meeting, auto-saving transcripts and concise summaries to each contact’s timeline for quick reference and sharing, reducing note-taking so you can focus on selling.
AI timeline summarization: Nutshell’s AI timeline summarization feature automatically condenses a contact’s full history of interactions into clear, easy-to-read summaries, so your team can instantly understand what matters most and act faster.
AI email reply starters: Nutshell’s AI email reply starter feature instantly generates personalized, context-aware responses to help you reply faster and more effectively.
Nutshell automatically creates rich profiles, logs every interaction, and gives you unified transcripts, analytics, and reporting, so your team can prioritize the hottest opportunities and deliver a consistent, personal experience from first touch to closed‑won.
