The post "What Can AI Do" talked up the Turing Test and asked if we can really replace people with AI? This post reviews a few areas where yes, Chat Bots can be an effective replacement for certain functions.
In the near to middle term (now to three years), the ‘chat’ functionality will take over more and more of the ‘omnichannel support centers’ (outgrowths of the human-staffed call center) with clear advantages:
1) Very consistent interactions (‘take me to your supervisor will have less effectiveness’)
2) Rapid extension and updating (faster than training 1000 people in a call center or setting up the rules for a new exception)
3) Access to private information (voice/image responses from private data/curated data)
4) 7x24 operation (without headaches of global staffing)
5) Full integration into workflows and regulatory processes with fidelity
Interactions and responses may be enabled by many devices (smartphones, laptops, table, smart speakers, embedded functions in vehicles). The personal comfort of a user’s experience may look to their ability to speak/hear in local languages/dialects, ask unscripted questions (with the best applications holding a large context and capability), and get results right away (email, text, image, fax, online, app). These capabilities can be accessible to persons with a wide variety of disabilities and preferences (like not typing or stylus). These are capabilities arguably at the level of a high-quality call center and call center automation today.
The costs and implementation quality of the BAD Projects to deliver these results will vary. The headaches of bringing up a 100-person call center will be exceeded by bringing up an ‘AI’ application tied to Big Data until the state of practice catches up with the state of imagination.
Our next post will talk about a few of the commercially available systems for smart chat.
You can find this and other posts about Big Data/AI/Data Science (BAD) projects at www.ekalore.com/bad-project-blog
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