Beyond 'chat with the training manual'

As discussed in a previous post, the basic version of an LLM-based advisory bot for MSMEs is like some all-knowing guru that sits in your WhatsApp contact list and waits for questions. This could be based on the LLM's training data, or on top of management best practice guides: a 'chat with your training manuals' tool.

This places all the burden on the entrepreneurs to know the space of potential questions and use cases. It also places the burden on them to come back to the tool despite all the demands on their time and attention. And it does not help them at all with the most important step of translating information into an action plan, and following up.

If a real life business coach did that, they wouldn't be very helpful, and we can see that an LLM-based tool working like that is also not very helpful and is quickly forgotten. Since 2023, WhatsApp has been running an experiement and a random selection of 1% of users can't receive any business messages unless they write first. We have a few of these accounts in our user pool, and find that they ask a few questions when they first try the tool, and then go back to life and all the other demands on their time and rarely re-engage. 

To be useful, there needs to be a two-way communication, rather than just a guru sitting on a mountain. In the other implementation of this type of tool in Kenya by the Otis et al team of academic researchers, their bot sent out reminders to use the tool (note though that those participants were pre-screened for the study and offered a reward for their completion, so its pretty different from a real-world set-up). There are many other promising ways that these tools can proactively engage with MSME entrepreneurs:

- Send out 'tips of the week' based on training materials

- Share the most frequently asked questions by other users from the previous month

- Scope out well-defined use cases where the tool can offer more direct and applied advice and even help complete tasks (eg upload a photo of your display for step-by-step imrpovements, calculate and evaluate margins on a particular product to plan a sale, get a new logo, etc)

- Exercises that the entrepreneurial training research has shown impactful for MSMEs (eg a goal setting module, a kaizen-type module, personal initiative-focused module)

- Personalized follow-up to build momentum (eg last week we talked about X and you said you wanted to try Y. Did you try it? How did that go?)

A core focus of our work is testing these and other ideas out, and finding out from our growing set of Bodega owners which ones were must useful and impactful for their businesses, and how else they'd like the tool to help them. Becuase they want and deserve something more useful than 'chat with the training manual'.