I think in practice, these are meant to replace training for people. I.e. it works along side the chat representative in a big call center/customer service role

I think in practice, these are meant to replace training for people. I.e. it works along side the chat representative in a big call center/customer service role and provides a first line of defense and just says RTFM. It is basically a boring re-implementation of search, except that for many big companies it has the side effect of causing them to work harder to make their search actually work well. Even if the UI ends up being poor or temporary, the investments in better knowledge management and search ranking internally ends up being a net benefit. Source: have seen behind the scenes at some larger outsourcers supporting these kinds of chatbots for customer service bots.