Founded in 2016, the French company Tolk.ai offers agentic AI solutions based on artificial intelligence. In a world where customer relations and interactions are increasingly concentrated on messaging applications, conversational agents (or chatbots) offer brands a unique opportunity to engage in conversation with their customers.
Tolk.ai thus helps B2B and B2C companies design AI agents that integrate seamlessly into their brand universe. These are deployed on mass-market messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, or Kik, as well as on internal messaging tools such as Slack, Zendesk, or Intercom, through a technology incorporating adaptive artificial intelligence.
Chatbots: Friends or Foes of Customer Relations Centers?
We are convinced that the future of customer relations rests on the hybridization of human and artificial intelligence. Chatbots efficiently handle level-1 requests and thereby boost the self-care approach. In addition, these tools enable companies to extend the service hours of their customer services.
As a result, they offer responsive and personalized support while keeping costs under control. In this relationship, often considered ambiguous, agents gain time to focus on high-value-added tasks. By relieving agents of a large share of simple requests, chatbots allow them to take on more responsibilities and develop their autonomy. Agents can then carry out upselling or cross-selling and take the time to handle complex requests.
Not All Chatbots Are Created Equal!
For Thomas Sabatier, co-founder of Tolk.ai, the future of customer relations lies in the hybridization of the human with artificial intelligence. Conversational agents are incredibly effective at handling level-1 requests.
Indeed, companies have the ability to extend the service hours of their customer services through chatbots and offer responsive, personalized support. Human operators will, in due course, be relieved of a large proportion of low-value-added requests and will be able to focus on complex requests requiring significant analytical capacity.
Chatbots can also accompany customers in their daily lives, by recommending content or products, offering sports, cooking, fashion, or wellness coaching, providing personal services, support, or customer service, and more. Tolk.ai thus enables brands to build a lasting and rich relationship in new environments such as messaging applications, Amazon Echo, or Google Home.
However, Thomas Sabatier acknowledges that chatbots are still in their early stages and that there is still a long road ahead. Progress in machine learning offers significant prospects for evolution, particularly in natural language understanding and in handling complex requests. It is important to understand that artificial intelligence remains artificial, and therefore limited.
According to Thomas Sabatier, the human brain is capable of adapting to any situation thanks to emotional intelligence, which is in perpetual evolution. Chatbots will continue to draw on human intelligence with exponential learning capacities. The evolution of chatbots mirrors that of the augmented human, improving our productivity and putting our intelligence to work on more complex and interesting challenges.
What advice do you offer to the customer relations department when equipping themselves with chatbots?
Finally, Thomas Sabatier advises customer relations departments wishing to equip themselves with chatbots not to embark on this kind of project without first understanding its stakes. The conversational UX is the part not to neglect: it is imperative to give your chatbot a strong personality, a tone, and why not a touch of humor.
Interview conducted by Romaine Klein and originally published on Interactions Digitales on October 10, 2016.
Company data updated on April 29, 2026.
