It’s no secret that ChatGPT and Large Language Models (LLMs) are taking the world by storm, but what’s yet to come is large-scale impact on business performance. Enterprises from financial institutions to fast-food brands are all using AI in one way or another, but so much more can be done to improve efficiency and productivity and reduce costs.
Generative AI (GenAI) technology has the power to revolutionise various business areas, including customer service, sales, marketing, and employee processes. By automating tasks, providing personalised recommendations, and delivering insights, business performance can be significantly enhanced.
It’s no wonder then that research from Deloitte finds nearly two-thirds of the business and technology leaders reported excitement as a top sentiment with regard to GenAI and the vast majority (79%) that they expect GenAI to drive substantial transformation within their organisation and industry over the next three years.
The adoption of Conversational AI (CAI) is a top example of GenAI-powered technology, with businesses across many industries looking to enhance customer experiences and streamline operations through sophisticated human-machine interactions via voice or text.
With CAI, enterprises can build an intelligent virtual assistant or AI bot to provide relevant, informative, and intelligent conversations that provide real business value and meaningful service experiences.
But while this excitement brews, it’s important to be prepared and always one step ahead of the curve when it comes to implementing GenAI and CAI solutions to realise real business value. Here’s what I anticipate we’ll see in this space in the near future.
Complex use cases and hyper-personalisation
Vast improvements thanks to natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms mean new intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) powered by CAI are capable of understanding context, sentiment and user intent to instead provide humanlike responses for premium experiences.
In today’s dynamic business environment, this means leaders are shifting their focus towards leveraging CAI-powered IVAs for more strategic purposes such as cross-selling, upselling, and personalised interactions. This shift is driven by a desire to bridge the gap between businesses and customers and unlock valuable insights to enhance experiences at an accelerated pace.
In fact, according to Gartner, organisations that focus their personalised messaging around helping customers can expect 16% more impact on commercial outcomes than those who don’t.
For example, retailers can use IVAs to improve customer experience by suggesting products based on their previous purchases, proactively asking questions and offer best-suited products for their needs, or sending them an exclusive offer to make them feel valued, or know their size/preference across product categories to minimise returns.
Clearly, hyper-personalisation and customisation like this is key to the evolution of more complex use cases. And it’s essential if an organisation wants to retain its current customer base while attracting new ones.
The evolution of LLM search capabilities
For contact centre agents, there is a growing desire to use automated technologies like GenAI and CAI to help them better support customers. In Kore.ai’s 2023 AX Benchmark report, the majority of contact centre agents (78%) said that they see IVAs as a means to improve their customer interactions by delivering more accurate and personalised information.
In 2024, Cognitive Search capabilities will play a significant role in enhancing the experience for contact centre agents and customers as large language models (LLMs) advance further.
For example, when agents ask questions in order to gather the best advice for their customers, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) based cognitive search can offer contextual, personalised and very relevant answers, not just search results, to help agents serve their customers better. And these answers could involve multimodal responses including relevant information videos or product options presented in a carousel format.
But there is still a long way to go for large multimodal models (an extended version of LLMs that will revolutionise the way people access AI) and investing heavily over the course of the next year will be key.
Balancing power with responsibility
With more AI-driven interactions taking place, regulating AI has been a hot topic for governments around the world.
By 2025, when talking to a contact centre agent, the technology will be so advanced that a customer will find it difficult to decipher whether they’re talking to a person or a virtual assistant. As a result, new EU legislation launched at the end of 2023 means organisations must tell a customer if they are speaking to a chatbot over a live agent at the start of their conversation.
With technology getting to a level of artificial cognitive equivalence, governments are clearly seeking to put legislation into place, so consumers know what kind of interaction they are having. We all have a collective responsibility to support the most vulnerable people in society.
So, what’s next? AI is an ever-evolving technology that will come with new and more stringent regulations, to ensure business data and end-user experience are safe and secure. However, governments globally must ensure that these regulations allow innovation to prosper.
For organisations, they can ensure they partner with providers that prioritise security, and compliance, and implement a responsible AI framework to help businesses create guardrails in their implementation. This enables enterprises to harness the benefits of GenAI without any potential misuse or unchecked AI behaviour – balancing power with responsibility.
Taking a forward-looking approach
As I said, being on the front foot when it comes to implementing AI is absolutely vital for organisations looking to be successful. Better productivity, reduced costs and more innovation are just some of the benefits companies are already seeing. GenAI is driving industries forward and pushing expectations, and your customers and employees are expecting more and more.
2024 will be full of twists and turns against a backdrop of economic challenges and changing regulations, but the expectations for high-quality, personalised experiences that add value to interactions remain.
Let’s shape a world where possibilities are limitless!
