Conversational AI examples and use cases in 2026

We hear the saying that conversational AI is taking over businesses' engagement strategies, and if you're not adapting, you're losing. Every new technology gets this hype from the early adopters. There is some truth to it. But what are the real use cases of conversational AI, and how can businesses adapt this to their routine? In this article, we try to break everything down.

What is conversational AI?

To engage in a natural, human-like conversation at scale and at any time with customers, businesses use conversational AI that can answer questions, resolve issues, and increase overall operational efficiency.

Benefits of conversational AI

As conversational AI can simulate humans, businesses can benefit immensely if it's deployed correctly. Some of the benefits of conversational AI are:

• Available all the time and can take any number of conversations simultaneously
• Can be deployed to assist any of your human-facing teams
• Improved engagement experience with extensive self-service functionalities
• Responds faster to customer questions, with zero waiting time
• Instant response rate and increased resolution rate
• Cost-efficient and improves overall operational efficiency
• Ultimately, more satisfied and loyal customers

But how exactly can businesses use conversational AI to achieve these benefits and more? We'll discuss them in detail in the coming sections.

Conversational AI use cases

Conversational AI—basically, a chatbot—can be deployed to businesses of any type and size. The general requirement for conversational AI is that the business have customer-facing departments. So, it can be deployed to your marketing, sales, support, and customer success teams for various use cases.

Conversational AI use cases in sales and marketing

Lead generation, qualification, nurturing, and conversion

For any business, websites are the final destination they want their prospects to reach. Even if they own other channels, ultimately, websites are designed as the engine that converts visitors into customers.

So, having conversational AI on their websites is crucial for businesses, as it can help their sales and marketing teams.

How does that work?

When prospects visit a website, they don't interact with the businesses unless they fill out a form or contact the business via email.

The average website conversion rate¹ is 2-3% across industries, meaning that out of every 100 visits to your website, only 2-3 visitors take action.

However, conversational AI, which comes with built-in triggers, can be configured to proactively initiate a conversation that will drastically boost the conversion numbers.

How drastic? Well, almost 50%².

By creating a proactive nudge, visitors will interact with the conversational AI chatbot, where businesses can collect their contact information and push them to CRM as leads.

Based on visitors' questions regarding the business and its offerings, marketing and sales teams can configure the chatbot to qualify their interest. If they ask in-depth pricing and other relevant questions, they can be configured to be considered highly interested.

Only these highly interested leads will be passed on to the sales team for nurturing. Sales teams can personalize their pitch to these leads based on their interest and the questions they asked, and then encourage them toward conversion.

This also means sales teams can avoid wasting their time on less-interested leads. They can be followed up for nurturing and conversion when they're ready to purchase.

Lead Scoring—Combining conversational AI with a scoring model

If you're using SalesIQ, Zoho's conversational AI platform, you can qualify leads based on their conversational history and combine that with their website activities.

With SalesIQ's visitor identification, you can track your visitors and what they do on your website. Lead Scoring can be configured to identify your high-intent prospects based on their actions. This'll help you segregate your visitors into hot, warm, and cold leads.

Product recommendations, virtual sales assistance, and scheduling

As we know, conversational AI can emulate humans; combining it with the knowledge base specific to your business can answer most of your visitor queries.

It doesn't stop there. If you offer multiple products and services, the AI chatbot can understand the prospect's needs, requirements, and use cases and recommend an appropriate solution.

If you want to take it up a notch, conversational AI can be configured to be your virtual sales assistant. Just as an actual salesperson would handle a visitor, conversational AI can learn their requirements, walk them through how your offerings can help them, and show them how to configure everything they need. It frees up your sales team's time, saves their effort in doing these repeated tasks, and allows them to focus on high-ticket prospects.

After conversational AI guides them through the product recommendations and assistance, and when they're ready to finalize the deal, the chatbot can schedule a meeting with your team immediately for quicker conversion.

Conversational AI use cases in customer support and success

Troubleshooting and the first line of customer support

In every business, a customer's interaction with your marketing collaterals and sales touchpoints is only during the evaluation stage. After conversion, they spend most of their time with your support team.

According to IBM³, 70-80% of businesses' queries are basic and repetitive L1 (Level 1) queries. However, this prevents agents' productivity and consumes their time and effort, which they'd rather spend focusing on critical high-ticket customers and issues. Conversational AI will help your customer support teams by being the first customer support line.

Integrated and trained with your knowledge base, resources, and other articles, the AI chatbot will share the relevant troubleshooting answers to help customers resolve their issues when such queries arise.

Query resolution, automated ticketing, and issue escalation

Conversational AI chatbots will be available instantly to the customers, so there'll be zero waiting time. Since it can provide answers as soon as they ask, it'll help with the resolution time. It helps businesses establish trust with the customers, and in turn, they get high customer satisfaction ratings.

When there are complex queries the conversational AI can't answer or where the customer is expecting a personalized solution, the chatbot can create an automatic ticket for them and a human agent can be looped in to attend to their query and resolve it. Customers can also use it to escalate their issues if a resolution isn't provided.

Customer retention and upselling

Once converted, it's the customer success team's responsibility to retain them. They can use conversational AI periodically to engage with the customers to know about the pain points if they're facing any.

It can also be used to roll out NPS (Net Promoter Score) or customer satisfaction surveys to identify happy customers among your user base and collaborate with them on case studies/testimonials.

With conversational AI, surveys can be run to understand the customer's usage, and based on their replies, the customer success team can try upselling.

Conversational AI examples

DoughBot 2.0, BreadPartners' conversational AI

BreadPartners, a family-owned ingredient manufacturer based in the US, has been using SalesIQ as its conversational AI. They started using SalesIQ for its visitor identification and insights capabilities and later found that the solution offers a top-notch bot builder.

Then, as part of their engagement strategy, they created DoughBot 2.0, a custom conversational solution for their business.

It's now helping their marketing teams by engaging passive visitors with proactive triggers. It's proven to be non-intrusive to them as it's helped reduce their bounce rate and increase engagement metrics.

Their customers can ask sales and support-related queries to learn more about their offerings and resolve any issues they may be facing.

DoughBot 2.0 is also integrated with ChatGPT to understand and answer more contextual and complex inquiries. From sample and documentation queries to employment opportunities, scheduling consultations, and more, conversational AI can handle them.

Here's what Michael Robinson, Senior Marketing and Sales Manager at BreadPartners Inc., has to say about SalesIQ:

Read more: BreadPartners achieves exceptional engagement with a lean team using Zoho SalesIQ

Future of conversational AI

Compared to the last-gen LLMs (large language models), the ones we have now—especially after OpenAI's ChatGPT came into the market—are advanced. They can understand the context and emotion behind a query well and draft a personalized reply.

Hyper-personalization: In the future, we can expect conversational AI to be hyper-personalized. With technology around AI agents coming up fast, they'll have all the information about your customers, which can help businesses provide a hyper-personalized engagement experience at scale.

Virtual assistants: As AI agents evolve, conversational AI combined with agents won't just give you the answers—it'll do what's needed to resolve the issues you're facing.

Multimodal capability: In the future, conversational AI won't be limited only to text inputs—it'll have multimodal interaction capabilities, i.e., the ability to receive, process, and understand voice, videos, gestures, and more.

Also, in the future, the privacy and security aspects of conversational AI will be strengthened and tightly integrated.

Leverage conversational AI for your business

Zoho SalesIQ offers conversational AI as an Answer Bot that's NLP-powered by our AI technology, Zia. If you're a business, you can leverage SalesIQ's conversational AI to assist your marketing and sales team by collecting leads and then qualifying, nurturing, and converting them into customers.

Once leads become your customers, you can have SalesIQ as your support team's first line of communication if they have any queries. It can attend to them instantly, which increases their trust in your brand, and the immediate resolution helps you build loyalty.

Customer success teams can use SalesIQ to run surveys and feedback campaigns to understand their pain points and collaborate with your happy customers to create case studies and testimonials.

Want to experience it firsthand? Sign up for the product and test it out yourself.