As an industry, we are on the cusp of a new frontier that pairs the power of natural human language with advanced machine intelligence—Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft said at Build 2016.*
The recent launch of Google Allo ushers in an age of chatbots, where companies will increasingly rely on AI-based technologies for providing a seamless and personalized customer service experience. Will bot technology be at the forefront of the AI revolution globally?
Artificial Intelligence (AI), today, is receiving more traction than ever before, especially the field of conversational bots that has grown exponentially. The definition of bot stays simple—it is a software entity that converses with humans using AI. But with the advancements in AI, bots today have become more human-like and are being applied in a variety of applications.
For a long time, AI bots were unheard of and were mostly portrayed in sci-fi movies as super-intelligent entities that either help save the world or take over it.
It all changed when big corporations announced their investment plans in AI—Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have dived into AI-powered bot technologies and are investing huge chunks of money and time in developing AI. It is the recent involvement of these companies that has brought bots into the limelight. With the arrival of Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Assistant, it is pretty clear as to how much the ‘bot’ buzzword has caught on and where this trend is going to take the world in the coming years.
Advantages
No matter which vertical a business operates in, it is imperative for it to see the rise of bots as a great opportunity—to connect with their customers at a whole new level that helps not only enhance customer-brand relationships but also personalize the customer service experience. Your customers do not have to download any special app to get connected, instead all they need to do is to open their favorite messaging app to start conversing with your bot.
Bots provide a highly personalized experience by filtering out user needs in chat sessions that can last for a minute or two. It is this aspect of personalization that is inspiring major ecommerce players to build bots that help their customers decide better on online purchases.
This story is from the November-December 2016 edition of The Smart Manager.
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This story is from the November-December 2016 edition of The Smart Manager.
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