Having developed and sold virtual agents for Watson, this is one of the major issue I faced. I had to make it clear to our customers (and especially to the sale

Having developed and sold virtual agents for Watson, this is one of the major issue I faced. I had to make it clear to our customers (and especially to the sales and marketing teams) that agents only work in a narrow domain, whose boundaries would need to be clear to the user. But often that got lost in translation and expectations were never met (especially in the early days of Watson when our PR was out of control). This said, it's not as limited as the author makes it. There are classes of open requests that can be handled directly from content (i.e. not like an expert system or IVR but more like a very smart NL search) without having to identify a precise intent. The Jeopardy system was a perfect example of that, and Google is now able to answer many question types (not just factoids but also questions with long answers like how-to) directly from the content. Dialog is the real limiting factor. Right now most dialog in production is scripted, with some smart feature like slot filling, but still much closer to an expert system than a statistical example based system.