Humanizing AI SMS Chatbots for 2025

Creating AI chatbots (AI for sales and AI for customer support) has never been easier. Technical complexity is giving way to UX mastery, and a myriad of providers stand ready to help anyone build a bot and launch a sequence with a few clicks.

Industry projections suggest that 85% of customer interactions will soon be managed without human agents.

The next challenge for automated customer engagement systems could be humanizing AI SMS chatbots, shifting focus from efficiency metrics to meaningful interactions that mirror human empathy and understanding.

The Chatbot Rise

AI for sales, AI for customer service, AI SMS, and other chatbots handle 30% of all business-consumer chats. Up to 80% of customer service and support organizations are applying generative AI technology in some form to improve agent productivity and customer experience.

Companies that adopt AI for sales and customer support do it primarily to cut costs. AI-powered chatbots are expected to save businesses $23 billion in the U.S. by automating 30% of tasks currently handled by contact center staff.

Reducing the need for human representatives without sacrificing the quality of the service is an enticing proposition on a spreadsheet. Who wouldn't want to trim payroll while maintaining customer satisfaction?

But this efficiency formula sometimes neglects that humans crave communication for more than just information; they seek it for understanding and connection. Whether human or AI, we know when we're talking to a script versus a being that understands our frustrations.

Automation Without Connection

If you own a smartphone—and about 5.2 billion people globally do—you've likely been bombarded by digital voices clamoring for your attention. The easier something is to make, the more likely it is to proliferate without restraint.

The cautionary tale of promotional emails showed us the futility of generic mass media. Most end up in the junk folder, unread and unloved. The more generic messages flood our phones, our mailboxes, and our minds, the less attention we dedicate to any of them. Even if a chatbot costs practically nothing to deploy, if it doesn’t reach and connect, it could be heading down the same crowded highway to irrelevance.

Empathy Is Essential

Humanizing AI SMS chatbots isn't about deceiving people into thinking they're conversing with humans. It's about treating them like family rather than conversion statistics, and providing them with a genuinely helpful service that acknowledges their experiences and respects their time and intelligence.

On a scale from zero to ten (with ten being human-level empathy):

• Simply feeding company information into a bot and calling it a day scores a zero
• Providing expected solutions to common problems is a five
• Answering questions before they arise—by relating to the user's experience and actively seeking to optimize it—approaches a ten

Most chatbots hover somewhere between zero and two. They're glorified FAQ pages built to follow rigid scripts and reroute chats. But chatbot technology continues to evolve, and companies who seek to connect with customers adopt new ways to reach them.

Humanize Your Bot

Optimizing a chatbot for humanity isn't a one-time task; it's an unending journey of trial and error, similar to the quest of personal growth, and there are plenty of tools to optimize the process.

Humans remain essential to this process. Many out-of-work customer service representatives have found new employment, training the very bots (AI for sales and AI for customer support) that replaced them. In the same way that evolving user-friendly software requires attentive engineers, empathy training requires training from human experience (HX) engineers.

The Turing test—whether a machine can exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from a human—can be supplemented by the Caring test. Does your sales or customer support AI demonstrate understanding beyond default responses? Does your bot recognize emotional cues in text? Can it adjust its tone when a customer is frustrated?

Embedding Empathy in AI Interactions

There are a few ways in which organizations inject empathy into AI chatbots:

1. Implementing Pattern Recognition: Training chatbots to identify textual cues indicating confusion, frustration, or urgency. (Mobile Text Alerts chatbots can be configured to recognize keywords and phrases signaling emotional states.)
2. Creating Dynamic Response Trees: Developing branching dialogues that adapt based on customer sentiment and previous interactions, rather than following linear conversation flows.
3. Incorporating Context Memory: Configuring chatbots to retain information from previous exchanges, eliminating the need for customers to repeat themselves.
4. Designing Appropriate Escalation Protocols: Establishing clear thresholds for when a human should intervene, based on sentiment analysis and complexity indicators.
5. Deploying Human Experience Engineering: Training and refining AI systems with esoteric knowledge from human interactions.
6. Establishing Feedback Loops: Including mechanisms for qualitative iteration based on data, human interactions, and feedback (nearly 70% of consumers value personalization when it's derived from data they've directly shared with a business).
7. Prioritizing Conversational UI: Creating more natural conversation flows with varied response styles that match the brand’s voice and conversational context.

These upgrades go beyond traditional off-the-shelf software and require sophisticated natural language processing. But more importantly, they require a fundamental shift in how companies view automated communication.

The Future of Digital Conversation?

As natural language processing improves and Large Language Models become more sophisticated, the line between human and machine communication will continue to blur. But technical capability isn't the limiting factor in creating more human-like interactions—it's the intention.

There's more to chatbots than extracting maximum value at minimal cost. Like their human predecessors, they represent the organization, build customer rapport, and shape brand perception.

Companies that care about the quality of customer interactions can gain an edge by training and continuously humanizing their automated communications.

Chatbots that will have a significant impact on customer satisfaction and business growth won't necessarily need to pass the Turing test, but they will need to pass the Caring test.

—Sean A Cooper