How far do you go with AI?
Does the basic chatbot respond to your current requirements? Will Machine Learning enhance your customer experience? Or are you ready for the full-fat generative iteration?
As this latest – and most topical – of technologies continues to fuel the next phase of the world’s digital transformation journey, these are the questions facing enterprises of all kinds and sizes.
The truth, of course, is that AI of all kinds is powering the constant evolution of how organizations provide their services, sell their products, and empower their workforces.
However, there is perhaps another, slightly controversial, set of truths: AI cannot (yet) fully replicate human inputs; AI cannot (yet) guarantee commercial success; and AI is definitely not (yet) a case of one size fits all.
That said, to deny its obvious and huge potential to redefine for a generation how the world works is, of course, recklessly naive.
Instead, organizations must assess where they are on their own individual roadmap and deploy AI to an extent which delivers added value whilst simultaneously avoiding unnecessary (and expensive) complexity.
Taking the guiding hand of an expert provider is a wise move.
“Many organisations are already benefitting from AI but aren’t really aware of it,” says Chris Bardon, Chief Software Architect at global enterprise-class contact center provider ComputerTalk, which is helping thousands to take the next step.
“Chat bots have been a thing for a long time, as has natural language understanding. Even predictive text on a phone keyboard is a form of AI. Generating new language – in the way ChatGPT is doing - is the flashy new element but it’s important to see through the hype and not be distracted.
“Understand the AI you already deploy, understand what new AI deployments can do for your business, and, most importantly, understand that it is actually the combining of multiple AI tools together that is really the way to achieve value-adding transformation.”
Of course, for most organisations, it’s all about improving the customer communication experience - smoothing their entry into the business and then getting them to where they want to be quickly and with minimum friction.
In the case of one ComputerTalk customer, they were able to leverage AI-powered natural language speech recognition to refine and improve its Interactive Voice Response (IVR).
“They had 25 different ways a call could be routed, and multiple menus that were failing to triage calls very effectively,” says Bardon.