The global market has witnessed rapid adoption of conversational AI solutions in the last two years. As a result of this increased demand, we are seeing more sophisticated solutions taking its applications far beyond the limitations of basic chat and voice bots. In fact, according to a Deloitte analysis of AI patent data filed in the United States during November 2019–2020, Conversational AI turned out to be one of the AI domains that filed the highest number of patents. When it comes to Conversational AI usage, enterprises have shifted their focus towards platform-based approaches to address multiple use-cases across modalities of conversation. For instance, Yellow.ai has seen voice as a channel surge in usage by its global enterprise customers over the last year and a half, driven by millennials and Gen-Zs who prefer to dictate text rather than type. This is tied to an industry trend of brands moving from traditional marketing to include more experiential and holistic strategies built around the end-to-end user experience. Going forward, we expect to see more innovation and adoption of solutions that leverage a blended Human + AI model across organizations, including for employee experience (EX) that spills into overall customer experience (CX).
With increased demand across industries for intelligent and omnichannel virtual assistants–more accurately described as Dynamic AI Agents–there will be a shift to low-code solutions that enable businesses to self-service in building tailored Dynamic AI Agents that fit their particular needs. The combination of voice and growth of more integrated next-gen conversational AI solutions is driven by and is driving several trends for the industry, outlined below.
1. The Shift to Total Experience Automation
As enterprises have grown more remote, virtual and distributed during the pandemic, organizations are seeing that EX and CX are increasingly interconnected. The next step in their digital transformation is to implement a more holistic strategy that streamlines processes from end to end via Total Experience (TX) automation.
Total Experience can help organizations capitalize on the new environment of remote work and distributed customers. It helps connect customers and employees by interlinking their interaction and experiences. TX thus incorporates a complete business experience, from customers to employees across departments. TX also helps in brand building because of its impact on the quality of end services or products. According to Gartner, companies with planned TX management will have more success than others through meaningful engagement with their customers.
2. The Rise of Voice as a Critical UI for Everything
It has been seven years since both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant were launched, and over a decade since Apple launched Siri. A recent survey by Voicebot Research finds that more than 54% of U.S. adults use smartphone-based AI assistants alone, and 44% would like their favorite mobile apps to add voice assistant functionality. Add that applications for voice will only continue to rise, and it’s clear that voice as a channel is not only here to stay but is evolving as a primary interface for human interactions — both at work and at play. Through further integrations along with growth in technological sophistication, voice AI’s ever increasing reach into more areas of our daily lives will lead to even greater impact on consumer behaviors tomorrow.
Furthermore, Voice AI solutions can engage across nearly every major language in the world today and, globally, there are 4.2 billion voice assistants in use across devices. While North America leads in sales and usage of these technologies, rising adoption rates in APAC as well as other global markets mean consumers will demand more native speech usage. Companies will need to expand further into Voice, particularly global brands that want to maintain and deepen their connections with customers worldwide.
At Yellow.ai, we saw demand for voice grow by over 300% during the last five months of 2021, with the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector fueling the most demand for the technology with 51% of deployments. Still testing the waters, the telecommunications industry followed at 10% of deployments, the tech sector at 7%, and education, CPG brands, retail & ecommerce, and automotive each at about 5%. With the technology’s scalability, value for contributing efficiencies and cost savings, and contribution to CX and EX, expect the industries dipping their toes into the tech now to follow BFSI’s lead in increased adoption. Voice, being the most natural form of communication, being intuitive and fast, has the potential to deepen brand – to – customer and employee engagements, providing instant and omnipresent brand experience, and automating sales, marketing and support – all of which are of high priority for businesses.
3. Blended Human + AI Agent Support
Gartner calls “the human touch” the strongest element in AI. And scientific research seems to heavily align with this position. In a recent article entitled “Human- versus Artificial Intelligence” in the March 2022 issue of the science journal Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, the authors conclude that the physical makeup of biological and artificial neural networks has an inherent impact on the capacities for human vs. AI limitations, noting the example of how humans could never perform arithmetic calculations at the level of a pocket calculator. They go on to discuss how the efficiencies, processing and compute capabilities of organic matter that makes up the human mind is hardwired to function much more efficiently in many other respects than a calculator, making the distinction between the more subjective area of task-difficulty that humans are more capable of grasping vs. more objective area of task-complexity that computers, calculators and AI – at least based on today’s and the near future’s technologies – can more effectively handle.
As organizations have come to quickly see the strengths and limitations of both humans and AI for different purposes, they are increasingly beginning to use AI as a way to supplement the human workforce, enabling people to do more of the ‘human’ work at which they excel and are hardwired to do. This makes for greater job satisfaction amongst employees and reduced employee churn within an organization in addition to faster, more effective responses for end users. Dynamic AI agents have the ability today to perform increasingly complex human-guided tasks — including those guided by a customer or employee seeking solutions to specific questions — but human agents are critical, providing the human touch for end-users where needed as well as oversight to AI agents in order to ensure superior UX across an organization.
4. AI Agent-Initiated Conversations
As the blended human and AI agent model gains traction within organizations, the next step they take will be with AI agent-initiated conversations that span promotions, campaigns, in-stock product updates, abandoned cart reminders and other sales and marketing tactics to proactively reach customers. Businesses don’t need to rely exclusively on email marketing campaigns to reconnect with customers but can directly reach them across conversational channels for more impactful engagement.
We see channels such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, Viber for example, getting powerful engagements through these AI-agent initiated conversations. From recovering abandoned carts to notifying customers of popular products being back in stock, retailers, in particular, will find more direct engagement via AI agent-initiated conversations over social channels as a powerful way to make sure their messages get seen rather than buried in a congested inbox. Similarly, AI agents can initiate proactive conversations with employees with notifications on HR policies, updates on new employee focused wellness and L&D campaigns and routine reminders to employees to automate and streamline a myriad of HR processes.
5. Self-Serve Makes Conversational AI More Accessible
Virtual assistants have historically been difficult to build, but the shift to low-code solutions for businesses is making the technology more accessible even for small startups and individuals, enabling them to create custom virtual assistants. Based on activity from Yellow.ai users, we’ve seen an upward trend for user signups to build virtual assistants during the second half of 2021, from approximately a dozen users in June to a few hundred by the end of the year.
As self-serve further develops with broader capabilities, greater resources for users to leverage, and increased awareness among smaller organizations, we will see increased adoption of this technology. Greater prevalence will mean more direct, personalized engagement from Dynamic AI agents across all channels, with reduced noise from brands leveraging tactics that are not nearly as efficient and effective.
Furthermore, as enterprises move towards platform-based approaches, the next in line will be leveraging pre-built, low-code Dynamic AI agents and pre-built accelerators to enable faster time-to-market and quicker time to value for enterprises. Enterprises can deploy these pre-trained agents in just a few clicks for a wide range of verticalised use-cases across functions and channels, reducing time-to-market by upto 50%.
As voice continues to gain prominence and Dynamic AI agents enable seamless human + AI support, organizations will achieve greater efficiencies and a more satisfactory Total Experience for employees and customers alike. We are seeing growing adoption of more intelligent conversational AI technologies today, providing greater reach internally and externally across organizations as they further adopt these solutions. As technology always tends to grow exponentially once it hits a tipping point, the role of Dynamic AI agents easing processes in our daily lives will become the status quo before you know it.
