What is a chatbot?

The word covers everything from a website’s FAQ box to advanced AI. The difference between a chatbot, AI assistant and AI agent, without the jargon.

A chatbot is a program you write to and get answers from. The word covers everything from the rule-based FAQ boxes of the nineties ("press 2 for opening hours") to today’s AI services, which makes it confusing: two things both called chatbots can be completely different in quality.

The useful dividing line comes in three steps. A classic chatbot follows a script and can only handle what that script covers. An AI assistant understands freely worded questions and answers using a language model, often with access to a set body of knowledge, like EuroWork’s specialists with your organisation’s own documents as the source. An AI agent takes a goal and carries out the steps itself: searching, reading, creating, with or without approval between steps. The further up the ladder you go, the more important traceability and control become.

When someone offers you "a chatbot," the key question isn’t what it’s called but where it sits on the ladder: does it follow a script, answer from your material, or act on its own? And for the last two: who sees what it’s done, and what does each answer cost?

EuroWork

Your employees are already using AI, often in private accounts where no one sees what gets pasted in. EuroWork gives the same AI help in one place where you are in control: sensitive data is caught before it is sent, processing stays in the EU, every answer shows its price and management sets the rules.

See how EuroWork works →