AI chatbots - Artificial Intelligence goes from newbie to mainstream

When everyone around us from toddlers to the aged rely on Alexa, Siri, and customer service chatbots, it’s no wonder Artificial intelligence may soon begin to feel like old news—at least to mainstream users. It has swiftly swayed its way from science fiction to reality, already enhancing business processes. In 2017 alone, the economy witnessed $12 billion in AI-related investments across 27 documented industries. One of the biggest advantages is that the application of AI is not just for a handful of big companies, it can be adopted by both small and medium-sized organizations to excel.

Acc. to Boston Consulting Group, 84% of respondents say Artificial intelligence will enable them to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage. 83% believe AI is a strategic priority for their businesses today. 75% state that Artificial intelligence programming will allow them to move into new businesses and ventures.

One of the most noticeable applications of Artificial intelligence’s journey into the mainstream in 2018 is “ more focus on consumer adoption of Artificial intelligence“ and making sure that it is accessible to wider ranges of people, summing it up in one word - Chatbots.

What are chatbots? - Computer generated programs with the ability of human conversation. Chatbots are so popular these days because they are easily accessible and fast to use and also because one can embed these into websites to facilitate customer interaction. Oracle conducted a survey stating that 80 percent of C-suite leaders and senior marketers already had implemented chatbots into their operations or plan to do so by 2020. Anyway, we all knew it was always only a matter of time before consumer demand and technological innovation, hand in hand, made way for chatbots for prospect engagement and higher sales.

Let’s explore a few possibilities that can be accomplished through this conversational platform that is taking the industry by storm?

Redefining customer experience

With the average human attention span of 8 seconds, which is less than that of a goldfish ( somewhere around 9 secs ), the AI-driven bots provide them with real-time solutions to their questions by taking cues from the conversation and present to them recommendations and arguments that address their preferences and needs. A clear win-win for both brand as well as the customer, in this case.

Voice bots

Typing on mobile screens with friends and colleagues is convenient, but text-based interactions with chatbots, I don’t think so. Talking to bots is a very human experience and it feels like interacting with another person. Thus, two-way, contextually aware conversations make day-to-day tasks fast and easy to complete. And moreover, Voice commands are useful everywhere. Whether its Google voice at home or Amazon assistant while shopping, the similar commands are a bliss. Not only in personal life, but it will also add value to our work lives too. The voice bots can help us schedule meetings, share files and also draw reports such as: “How did we do on our email campaigns last month ? ”.

Data Analytics and AI

Analytics has been playing colossal roles in changing the bottom line for business for a long time. More and more companies are gaining a competitive advantage through analytics and data visualization and are looking to implement artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze more complex data and get more accurate results and enable more comprehensive analytics strategy to achieve business goals. If we talk about the customer engagement industry, conversations through these bots can be analyzed for and identify the language that leads to a sale and enable sales prediction.

Blockchain and AI

Blockchain ( Check one of our Blockchain project here ) is a filing system for digital information that is concerned with accuracy, authentication and execution and is tamper-proof where robust databases can be updated only by those with permission. AI, on the other hand, helps in decision making by assessing patterns and datasets and ultimately triggering autonomous interaction. Decisions made by AIs by assessing large no. of dependent and independent variables can sometimes be complex for humans, taking into consideration the huge amount of data. But, if decisions are recorded ( datapoint-by-datapoint basis ) on a blockchain, it becomes way easier to analyze. This also comes with the added confidence that the records are not tampered with from the very beginning.

One thing everyone is quite sure of is that AI is reshaping businesses everywhere and resulting in the emergence of new business innovations and new forms of competition. Check out our AI related experience here.  Now is the time for industry influencers to watch this trend closely and develop a strategy to include AI in their day-to-day business activities and make their existing technology smarter and unlock the power of all the available data.