The
hottest tech story these days is ChatGPT. At first glance, the AI bot from
OpenAI seems to be scary good at a lot of things humans do now, like answering questions, coding, and writing in all manner of formats, from research summaries to poems to parodies of almost any writing style you can imagine. ChatGPT has received push-back and criticism, mostly around its accuracy. However, many observers are nonetheless impressed with the sophistication of the bot.
Of course, AI has been emerging in contact center applications for some time now, and even if ChatGPT isn’t something you’d trust to fly solo with your most important customer interactions, this area is advancing so quickly you can’t afford to look away for even a moment. That’s why I’m so excited about the Enterprise Connect keynote announcement we’re making today: Behshad Behzadi, VP of engineering, conversational AI at Google Cloud, will take to the main stage on Wednesday, March 29, to provide his company’s vision of how AI, together with the cloud and zero-trust security, will underpin the customer experience technology of the future.
And I'd be remiss if I didn't also highlight that the other keynoter we announced today, Zoom, has also had its share of AI-related announcements over the last year, releasing customer intelligence tool
Zoom IQ for Sales and
acquiring conversational AI provider Solvvy earlier this year. Joseph Chong, head of platform & industry marketing for Zoom, will also take the main stage on Wednesday, March 29. Zoom is making so many moves to expand as a full platform, from contact center to email, that their view of the industry and their place in it will be essential, and I can't wait to see what Chong shares regarding that vision.
On the topic of AI and CX, contact center analyst Blair Pleasant of COMMfusion and BCStrategies shared during an Enterprise Connect webinar this week that about 20% of agents are currently using AI in some capacity. The most common use cases across contact centers are personalization, intelligent routing, self-service apps, agent analytics, and chatbots, she said.
As that list suggests, and as Pleasant pointed out in the webinar, many of the most promising AI applications for the contact center are internal, focusing on helping agents by making the infrastructure more efficient at things it already does, such as route calls and provide rich customer data to the agent in real-time. AI can also help the business by greatly increasing the effectiveness of analytics.
A couple of Enterprise Connect sessions will speak to these AI-driven opportunities. Max Ball of Forrester will present a session at EC23 entitled,
Trouble "Hearing" Your Customers? AI Can Help, in which he’ll look at the way AI lets contact centers analyze customer sentiment, intent, and other key parameters across every call that comes into the center — not just a sampling, as was the case in the past. Not only does this trove of data and analytics become helpful in improving agent training, but it also supplies insights to organizations like marketing to inform product decisions and the like.
On a related topic, Robin Gareiss of Metrigy will present a session entitled,
Developing Solid Self-Service Requires a Knowledge Management Overhaul. As the name suggests, this session will explain why AI-driven improvements to the underlying knowledge management systems are critical in order to leverage self-service capabilities like virtual assistants and natural language processing. Currently, Gareiss notes in her session abstract, “most companies' knowledge management systems are woefully out of date, in terms of both content and technology.”
So, AI is poised to play a major role at almost every level of the contact center, and I’m looking forward to seeing what enterprises do with it. I hope you can join us in Orlando for
Enterprise Connect 2023 to partake in what’s sure to be an exciting series of discussions, as we cover not just AI and the contact center, but hybrid work, collaboration platforms, video, security, and every other topic the industry is focused on.
