By Sean Aaron, Associate Strategist

I was out of the country last week and moments after walking into the airport, I got word that my returning flight was cancelled. Long story short, my girlfriend and I were stuck in Mexico for an extra night. No biggie. Our plan of attack consisted of three easy-to-follow steps:

Step #1: Find a cheap hotel near the airport

Step #2: Grab some ice cold beer

Step #3: Hunker down until the airline can get us on a flight the following day

First things first, finding a hotel. Attempts at downloading a popular hotel search app were futile. The international roaming 2G data my iPhone was chugging along with wasn’t up to the job of downloading 31mb and, to be honest, I didn’t even need the entire app. The only information I needed were a few names, addresses, and phone numbers for the nearest hotels. Determined to resolve this travel hiccup as soon as possible, I put my phone in my pocket and walked over to the nearest airport information desk for some old school, face-to-face human interaction.

When asked, the guy at the information desk was personable and understanding. He asked a few questions about what we needed and then connected us via landline to the front desks of two nearby and respectable hotels. We did some price and amenity comparisons on the fly and made our reservation over the phone. Thirty minutes and an air-conditioned hotel shuttle ride later and we’re ordering ice cold beers from room service and soaking up the complimentary wifi. A simple process.

The moral of this story? Sometimes the most effective technology isn’t the most advanced. There wasn’t a need to download a relatively large hotel app. We simply asked the right person and got the right answer.

Several hundred miles away, around the same time I was out on vacation, Mark Zuckerberg walked out onto the stage at F8, Facebook’s annual developer conference, to announce Facebook’s plans over the next decade to support the development and progression of artificial intelligence. One element of that 10-year roadmap is making Facebook’s Messenger app a platform for developers to build and deploy artificial intelligence-powered chatbots.

These chatbots will be designed to mimic human interaction in order to assist real humans in their day-to-day lives after being issued simple, natural language requests and commands. Facebook, and the other major private messaging platforms, already feature AI-powered chatbots and Amazon’s Echo, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana are voice-input chatbots that consumers have experienced and are familiar with.

The reason why brands are (or at least should be) excited about chatbots is that they require, when compared to mobile apps, a significantly lower investment in terms of cost, development time, and design resources. Beyond being able to connect with users without blowing through the budget, chatbots have the potential to a truly unique means of connecting with consumers without having to tackle some of the difficulties current apps suffer from. Namely, requiring that users download and store large storage-sucking apps. As we know, downloading apps is a data intensive process from both a bandwidth and storage standpoint. A notion that is particularly important when we consider how many users in the developing world don’t have access to high-speed data or sufficient storage.

With all this in mind, while the potential for chatbots is high, the technology is still far off from the voice commanded computers we know and love from science fiction movies. When it comes to simple day-to-day tasks, like finding a nearby hotel, it’s not too hard to see how an AI-controlled chatbot could be helpful but these contemporary manifestations of chatbots, both of the text and voice-input varieties, are inherently limited.

Today’s AI-powered bots are only capable of understanding human requests because of the input constraints put on them by their developers. It’s easy to ask Siri what the temperature is outside because those kinds of inputs are easy for developers to anticipate but what about a user who asks Siri if they should wear an extra layer if they’re going to stay out late? Siri, and her chatbot brethren, would have to do a lot more than listen for keywords and respond with relevant information. They’d have to be able to process many subtle social cues and linguistic hints before being able to respond accurately and effectively.

This isn’t a hit piece on artificial intelligence. I, for one, look forward to our artificial intelligence-powered overlords of the near future. Today’s AI only understands when I ask a question it was programmed to respond to but, as we all know, life comes at you fast and is often unpredictable. While nerds like me are (not so) patiently awaiting truly dynamic artificial intelligences — AI’s capable of parsing our slang, sarcasm, thick accents, or just ones that can pick up on our moods or temperaments — it’s today’s AI, developers, and users that are providing the real-life experiences that will help to pave the way for the advanced AI-powered bots of our future.

Maybe one day, I’ll be able to utter “Computer, lager beer, ice cold” and get more than strange, judgmental looks from my girlfriend. Until that day, however, chatbots are pure novelty.