Innovation Heroes: Digital AI humans fix what chatbots get wrong

Bad chatbot experiences aren’t just annoying — they erode customer trust.

Everyone knows the pattern: the bot misunderstands, menus loop endlessly, and frustration rises. But the deeper issue isn’t the chatbot itself. It’s that enterprises have lacked a fast, low-risk way to validate whether AI-driven engagement will work in production.

“Well, first of all, it starts with making that chatbot experience accessible,” said Jack Hogan, VP of Advanced Growth Technologies at SHI. “There is a humanization factor here that’s necessary to really bring AI to the forefront of your daily experience.”

Which is exactly what we explored on the latest episode of Innovation Heroes, a podcast from SHI. Hogan met with host Ed McNamara and HPE’s Robin Braun, VP of AI Business Development, Hybrid Cloud. Together, they surfaced three insights that every organization should understand before deploying customer-facing AI.

1. Engagement requires presence more than answers

Traditional chatbots can deliver information, but they rarely create trust or sustained engagement. Hogan explains that the difference comes down to how the “brain” and the “body” of a digital AI ambassador work together to create a believable interaction.

“When you put a face to it, a personality to it, it’s really important to humanize that experience, to be able to use the incredible things that a chatbot experience is just the gateway into,” Hogan said.

Braun adds that responsiveness is just as important as realism.

“If the digital ambassador is not responsive, how many of us, if you’re not getting an immediate reaction to your question… say ‘forget it, I’ll use something else’ or ‘I’ll look up something else?'” she asked.

This is why SHI and HPE focused heavily on ultra-low latency with our Digital AI Ambassador solution. And it’s why digital humans must feel instant, expressive, and human-paced enough to hold a user’s attention.

2. Guardrails are what make these systems safe

When customer-facing AI hits the real world, users test boundaries immediately. Braun highlights a simple truth: once you deploy a digital human, end users can ask it anything.

“You have lost all control over what questions are going to come up, what’s going to be asked, what they’re going to try to have the ambassador do,” Braun said.

This is where a solution like HPE’s Private Cloud AI becomes essential. Air-gapped deployment, lifecycle-managed infrastructure, pretrained NIMs, and strict policy controls ensure the system can answer accurately without drifting into unsafe territory.

The result: an engaging experience that protects both the brand and the user.

3. The game changer isn’t AI itself; it’s how fast you can prove it works

Most AI initiatives collapse under the weight of long timelines. SHI deliberately attacked this barrier through our Imagine, Experiment, Adopt framework, built inside our AI & Cyber Labs.

“The tooling we’ve put into the lab platform really makes this possible. It allows us to go from idea to prototype and output a fully functional digital ambassador in that rapid timeframe,” Hogan said. “It is really speeding the development cycle up.”

Braun is clear that slow AI programs simply don’t survive.

“The speed that AI moves at, your project can’t take 12 to 18 months,” Braun said. “Where you end up will not be where you could have ended up if you follow the type of process that Jack [Hogan] is talking about.”

This shift, from multi-year transformation to six-week validation, means organizations can learn fast, scale fast, and build confidence with leadership before making major investments.

The final word

Digital AI ambassadors aren’t designed to replace people.

They’re built to elevate service quality, expand multilingual access, and bring brand-aligned personalities to high-demand customer interactions. And with solutions like the one built with HPE, SHI, and NVIDIA, proving their value no longer takes years.

In a landscape moving this fast, speed is no longer a luxury; it’s a competitive requirement.

This episode of Innovation Heroes is brought to you by HPE.

NEXT STEPS

Under pressure to deploy AI that actually works? Listen to the full conversation here to learn how our team can help you stand up production-ready digital humans in six weeks.

And when you’re ready to bring in your own digital AI ambassador, visit shi.com/digitalhuman to book your executive review.

You can also find episodes of the Innovation Heroes podcast on SHI’s Resource Hub, Spotify, and other major podcast platforms, as well as on YouTube in video format.

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