NEW: We partnered with Wharton to fix AI chatbots

TL;DR: We’ve partnered with The Wharton School - arguably the best marketing school in the world - to launch the Wharton Blueprint for Effective AI Chatbots. You can download it for free below.

🎓 What just happened, and how we got here

I've been really looking forward to sharing this news - and honestly, I still can't quite believe it myself.

A partnership like this - with a top Ivy-league business school - is something that makes you pause and reflect.

To me, it’s proof that doing things the hard way, the right way, eventually pays off. For the last 4.5 years, we’ve published 250+ insights, built 6 Playbooks, and helped tens of thousands of marketers do better, smarter work. Every single insight was fact-checked, precise, transparent, and never dumbed down - even when the science was messy, complicated, or didn’t fit the narrative.

That approach earned us the trust of brands like Mars and Wise, and slowly (very slowly) the respect of the world’s top marketing researchers - the same ones I hugely admire and was honestly a bit intimidated by when I hit ‘Send’ on the first ever Science Says insight.

But this - this is something else. When the best marketing school in the world says, “We want to work with you to bring our science to the world” - that is a level of validation that took me by surprise. 

I couldn’t be prouder of the team who brought us here, and in particular to our academic advisor and mentor Stefano Puntoni, who had the idea of this collaboration, co-authored this Blueprint with me, and first introduced us to Wharton, where he is one of the leading researchers in human-AI behavioral science (and I don’t say this lightly, the amount of discoveries he publishes is astonishing - I am yet to discover his productivity secret).

Thank you for being with me on this journey. To many new heights together 🙏

📘 Introducing: The Wharton Blueprint for Effective AI Chatbots

AI chatbots are quickly becoming the standard for handling product inquiries, complaints, and more. Yet, despite huge investments in their engineering, tech, and the AI models behind them - customers still dislike them. For example, 66% of 35,000 chatbot interactions at a telecom company got only a 1 out of 5 rating.

Why does this happen? Because the core issue isn’t about the technology - it’s psychological. How people perceive your chatbot and interact with AI determines their satisfaction far more than how advanced the next AI model is.

And understanding this psychology of AI chatbots is why we partnered with Wharton's Human-AI Research department to create the Wharton Blueprint for Effective AI Chatbots. 

This free practical guide translates the latest behavioral science into simple techniques you can use to design chatbots that make customers happy - and more likely to buy from you.

As Stefano Puntoni, co-author of the Blueprint and co-director of Wharton Human-AI Research, says in a webinar we just recorded (out soon!):

"The next frontier for AI chatbots is not computer science but behavioral science - understanding how to make it work for the customer rather than just how to make it work."

In the Blueprint, you'll find insights like:

• Label your chatbot as “constantly learning”, people will be up to 17% more likely to listen to its advice

• People were 23.4% less satisfied with human-like (vs machine-like) chatbots when angry

• People trust AI up to 22% more when they see evidence of its success in real-world tasks (e.g., “Booked 531 flights today!”)

A snapshot of the Wharton Blueprint for Effective AI Chatbots

⬇️ Get your free copy of the Blueprint

The guide is 100% free, based on the latest science, and ready for immediate implementation.

Pro tip: Once you read the Blueprint, you can feed it as part of instructions to the AI powering your chatbot to immediately see some improvements.

Thanks again for being part of this special moment. I hope you’ll love the Blueprint.

Thomas
Founder, Science Says

P.S.: Would your team benefit from a science-based blueprint like this for your areas of focus? We regularly give on-demand insights to the best marketing teams in the world. Find out more here.