A chatbot is a very good reception desk. It can take a name, confirm a booking, answer the question you have already answered five hundred times. What it is not is the person who notices you are upset before you have said why.
Where it earns its place
Repeated, well-defined questions with a right answer: opening hours, order status, how to reset a password. These do not need a human's judgment — they need speed and availability, which is exactly what a bot is good at.
Where it should hand off, not answer
Anything with a complaint attached, anything ambiguous, anything the person has already tried to solve themselves — that is the moment automation should recognise its limit and put a person in front of the customer, quickly and without a form to fill in first.
The failure is not having a chatbot. The failure is not building the exit.