Convivial Conversational Agents -- shifting toward relationships

Conversational AI (CAI) systems offer opportunities to scale service provision to unprecedented levels and governments and corporations are already beginning to deploy them across services. The economic argument is similar across domains: use CAI to automate the time-consuming conversations required for customer, client or patient support. Herein we draw on our work in dementia care to explore some of the challenges and opportunities for CAI, and how a new way of conceptualising these systems could help ensure essential aspects for human thriving are not lost in the process of automation.