Imagine spending $50,000 on a chatbot, only to realize it doesn’t integrate with all of your systems, can’t be updated without additional fees, and delivers generic, off-brand responses. Unfortunately, this is the reality for many businesses that buy chatbots or use chatbots-as-a-service. 

AI chatbots have revolutionized communication across customer service, internal operations, and sales engagement. They provide instant responses, reduce human workload, and improve overall efficiency. Gartner has projected that by 2027, approximately 25% of organizations will use chatbots as their primary customer service channel. 

Yet, many companies make the wrong investment when adopting a chatbot. They spend tens of thousands of dollars on vendor solutions, only to find them inflexible, difficult to customize, and costly to maintain. 

If your business is considering a chatbot, here’s why you should think twice before going the chatbot vendor route—and how Decisions customers can build a smarter, more cost-effective chatbot on their own terms. 

The Hidden Costs of Vendor Chatbots  

Buying a chatbot from a vendor might seem like the best way to go, but companies often underestimate the long-term costs and limitations, such as: 

High Licensing Fees: Many chatbot vendors charge tens of thousands of dollars per year in licensing costs alone.  

Limited Customization: Prebuilt solutions often lack flexibility, forcing businesses to adapt their processes to the chatbot rather than the other way around.  

Restricted Knowledge Bases: Some chatbot vendors limit the knowledge sources that can be used, restricting the information your AI is trained on and impacting accuracy of responses. 

Slow Deployment: Vendor dependency often leads to long development cycles and delays.  

Ongoing Maintenance Costs: Need to tweak your chatbot? Most vendors charge extra for updates, modifications, and AI training enhancements.  

Data & Security Risks: Using a vendor means entrusting sensitive customer and business data to a third party, often without full control over compliance measures.  

In short, businesses overpay for chatbot solutions that don’t fully meet their needs, are difficult to adapt, and come with recurring expenses that add up fast. 

Why Building Your Own Chatbot is the Smarter Choice  

Instead of purchasing an expensive, vendor-controlled chatbot, Decisions customers have a better option—they can build one themselves without starting from scratch or spending a dime. 

When Decisions developed Dart, an AI-powered chatbot built into its process automation platform for customer support, the product team recognized a broader need. Many customers could benefit from a similar solution for customer support, marketing, sales engagement, or internal operations. Rather than requiring businesses to develop their own chatbot from the ground up, Decisions made the Dart framework, known as Cortex, available for free to its customers. 

With pre-built components, businesses can bypass the heavy lifting of bot development while still customizing the chatbot to fit their exact needs. They can add and manage multiple knowledge bases, ensuring the AI is trained only on the information they choose. Unlike traditional chatbots, Cortex gives customers full control over AI learning, enabling organizations to fine-tune responses, improve accuracy, and align the chatbot with their specific business requirements—all without external dependencies. 

The Brains Behind Your Chatbot: How the Decisions Framework Powers Smarter AI 

A chatbot is only as good as the intelligence and automation behind it. While many chatbot vendors focus on pre-built, front-end conversational interfaces, they often lack the depth needed to truly customize interactions, automate decisions, and integrate seamlessly into business processes. 

That’s where Decisions’ chatbot framework stands apart. 

Instead of just providing a chatbot interface, the Decisions framework powers the backend intelligence—the “brains” of your chatbot. It’s where: 

• Rules and logic are defined, ensuring the chatbot responds based on business policies and workflows. 

• Workflows and automation execute behind the scenes, driving actions beyond just answering questions. 

• AI-driven decision-making occurs, allowing the chatbot to dynamically assess situations and trigger the right processes. 

Think of Cortex as the control center. The interface is where the conversation takes place, but the real intelligence—rules, workflows, and AI—lives below the surface, and that is what Decisions provides. 

Integrating Cortex with any number of free interfaces with an open API is a quick process that when combined with desired configuration, testing, and deployment, can get your chatbot live in as little as 3-4 weeks—compared to months with a chatbot vendor.  

Get an advanced communications tool while saving time and money. What’s not to like? 

To explore the chatbot accelerator, talk with your Customer Success Manager, or check out the pre-built framework on the Decisions Marketplace.