Correlation Is Not Conversion: The Problem of Attributing Business Results to AI
Three months after deploying an AI booking assistant across a hospitality client’s website, the stakeholder asks a reasonable question: Did the chatbot increase our bookings? Your analytics pipeline has a number ready. Users who interacted with the chatbot booked at 11.2%. Users who never opened it booked at 3.1%. That looks like an 8.1 percentage point lift. Ship the slide deck. Schedule the quarterly review. That number is structurally meaningless. Not approximately wrong. Not slightly optimistic. It conflates who uses chatbots with what chatbots cause, and those are entirely different questions. ...