I'm vaguely on the periphery of a project to create a sort of info-hub chat-bot. The project lead was really enthusiastic about getting me on board and helping me develop my skills in that direction.

Apparently there's a lot of people calling the wrong departments about stuff. Think along the stereotype of people calling the IT "Help Desk" for a broken light. The bot should help them find the right info, or at least the right department.

The issue, according to management, is that information is spread all over the place. Some departments use Confluence, others maintain pages on the intranet webserver. One has their own platform for FAQ and tickets, except it's not actually for tickets any more, which you'll only find out when they unhelpfully close your ticket with that remark. Wanna guess what confused users do? Right, call some other department.

The obvious solution would be getting each department to be more transparent and consistent about their information, responsibilities and ways to reach them, possibly even making them all provide their info on some shared knowledgebase with a useful search function. But that would require people to change their stuck habits.

So instead they develop a bot supposed to know all the knowledgebases and access them for users, answer simple queries, point them the right way for complex ones and potentially even help them raise tickets with the relevant departments. Surely, that will improve things?

The one time I tried it, I asked it a question that would have been my area of responsibility to see if people would actually find me or at least the general department. Yeah, nah, it pointed me at someone not just unrelated to that function or department, but also responsible for a different geographical area. IDK what they trained it on, but it probably didn't include any mentions of that topic, which is fair, given it's still in development.

But instead of saying "I have no information on that" or direct me to a general contact, it confidently told me to do the thing it's supposed to fix: bother the wrong person.

And the project lead wonders why I didn't inmediately jump at the offer to join his department.

It's really the middle management they don't understand, not the floor staff, the people who do all the checking and compliance which the top management now think can be replaced by AI