Wouldn't a company improving their website be the more reasonable approach though? Rather than hiding the equivalent features behind a maze of keyword matching and sub-par natural language processing? A chat-bot is only going to be capable of supplying information and service that should be far more trivial to just expose on a website via simple forms, user-account features, and F&Q/knowledgebases.

In my experience, most tech-savvy people do not want to call or chat. They only resort to those options when they can't find a way to do what they need to on a company's website. There is another group that wants to talk to a real person regardless, but they usually prefer to call. I'm not aware of any group that wants, or has their needs best met, by talking to a chat-bot.