These two words are often used interchangeably, but the difference between them is the difference between an answering machine and an employee. It directly affects both the price and whether your task gets solved at all.
How an ordinary chatbot works
A scripted bot follows a predefined tree. Press «Check price» — get the price list. Type «delivery» — get delivery terms. Anything not covered by the tree it simply does not understand: it replies «I did not get that» or silently calls an operator.
That is not a bad thing. For booking an appointment, picking a service from a list or checking an order status, a scripted bot works predictably and costs little. Problems start when a real person writes in real language.
What an AI agent does
An AI agent understands the meaning of a message rather than matching keywords. A customer can write «how much would it be for two of them with delivery to karaganda» — lowercase, no punctuation, with typos — and still get a sensible answer.
It answers from your knowledge base: price list, policies, product descriptions. It remembers the conversation, so «and the second one?» makes sense to it. And most importantly, it honestly hands over what it does not know instead of making things up.
When a simple bot is enough
- Requests are uniform and fit into 5-10 scenarios
- The customer needs to pick from a list rather than ask a question
- The job is to book, remind or notify about a status
- Budget is limited and the request volume is small
When you need AI
- Customers write freely and ask unexpected questions
- The catalog is large and questions concern specs and compatibility
- Many requests arrive outside working hours and are currently lost
- You need not just an answer but triage of the request into the CRM
- Customers write in different languages or a mix of them
The main misconception
Many fear that AI will «invent» things and promise the customer too much. The concern is fair but manageable: a properly configured agent answers only from the loaded materials and hands anything beyond them to a human. That is a matter of setup, not of the technology's nature.
The second misconception is that AI will replace managers. In practice it removes typical questions, while complex and high-value conversations stay with people — with the conversation context already collected.
What to choose
Look at your actual conversations from the past week. If 80% of messages fit a few repeating scenarios, start with a scripted bot — it is cheaper and faster. If people write at length and differently every time, a scripted bot will annoy them and you should go straight to AI.
You can also combine: buttons for typical actions, AI for free-form questions. That is usually what we do. Message us on WhatsApp, we will look at your conversations and say what fits.