Live chat needs somebody at a keyboard. An AI chatbot answers from your pages at two in the morning. Most sites want the second one first.

The real difference is who is awake

Most questions arrive outside your hours, and most of them have been answered on your website already. Live chat leaves those visitors with a form and a promise to reply tomorrow, by which time a competitor has answered them.

A chatbot that reads your pages answers them there and then. Not better than a person - the same answer a person would have given, at an hour when no person is going to.

What each one costs you

Live chat's cost is attention. Somebody has to watch it, and the value collapses if nobody does: a chat window with nobody behind it is worse than no chat window, because it promised something.

A chatbot's cost is setup and upkeep - choosing pages, keeping them current, reading the misses. It does not rise with the number of conversations in the way a person's time does.

Where live chat still wins

A complaint, an order that went wrong, a negotiation, anything needing judgement or an apology - those belong to a person. So does anything your website does not say, and anything where being slightly wrong is expensive.

There is also a kind of visitor who wants to be talked to, not answered. High-value, slow-moving purchases work that way, and no chatbot changes it.

Running both

The usual arrangement is not a choice at all. Let the chatbot answer the questions your pages cover, and give it an obvious route to a person for everything else - an email address, a form, a handover to live chat during your hours.

Then watch what it could not answer. That list tells you two things: which pages to write, and which questions genuinely need a person. After a month, most teams find the second list is far shorter than they expected.

A test that settles it

Take last month's enquiries and mark each one with the hour it arrived and whether your website already answered it. Two numbers fall out. The share that arrived outside your hours is what a chatbot can pick up tomorrow; the share your pages already answered is what it can pick up well.

If most enquiries land out of hours and your website covers them, buy the chatbot and be done. If most arrive at eleven in the morning and need a judgement call, a chatbot will not help much and a person will. Most small sites find the first pattern, which is why the order in this post is the order it is.