There’s no denying that AI and the development of machine learning technology will have an impact on the future of business communications – but just how much of an impact has yet to be discovered.
With a recent report claiming that the AI software market will grow from $1.38 billion in 2016 to $59.75 billion by 2025, it’s clear that the trend shows no signs of slowing down and investing in it could soon become a necessity rather than a choice.
However, for many businesses the concept of AI is still unclear and many questions still need to be answered regarding what AI is, what it can do and how it can help improve business performance.
With this in mind, we have written a short yet incisive article that attempts to answer some of these questions and help give our readers the information they need to begin planning their journey into AI.
What is AI, exactly?
AI is a term we use to describe a set of highly advanced technologies that are used for a number of reasons in consumer and enterprise markets across the world. We call it artificial intelligence on account of its ability to replicate human abilities such as learning, seeing, hearing and reasoning.
Though you may not have noticed it, AI is already being used in the world around us with (to give just one common example) voice recognising smartphone applications such as Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana already having ingrained themselves deep within first world culture.
However, with the rise of cloud technology and the demand for faster, more efficient and cost-effective solutions in business, AI technologies such as machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, natural language processing and machine reasoning are being used much more at enterprise level, too.
What can machine learning AI do?
If we were to use the traditional IVR as a way of comparison, we can see that automated services operate via a non-interactive audio recording that gives a set of instructions to the caller who then follows said instructions by entering a number on their dial pad to get what they want.
Though the recording provides instructions, it has no control over where the call will be routed and cannot do anything more to help the customer outside of the fixed options it’s programmed to work with.
With AI chatbots, however, the technology is built using algorithms that allow the machine to think of alternative solutions that go past option 1-6 and use what information it has learnt from the customer to either resolve the issue independently or connect them to an agent specifically trained to handle that request.