Why Conversational AI Is The Future Of Business And Customer Success

Opportunities to leverage AI have recently skyrocketed, thanks to the sensational abilities of the recently-launched ChatGPT from OpenAI. For many of us in the data space, it's been exciting to see the promise of conversational AI — which we first glimpsed back in 2018 when Google demonstrated its Duplex system — accelerate into the mainstream. But this isn't just a phenomenon of the last few weeks. AI has been affecting our lives more and more for years — but the difference is that people have not generally witnessed those changes directly. Instead, many of the benefits of AI and machine learning have existed behind the scenes. For example, AI has been used in the healthcare industry for image analysis to improve diagnosis outcomes. In financial services, AI has long assisted in the identification of potentially fraudulent transactions. And most people know that AI helps improve their search results and personalized experiences online while also improving data privacy. But the launch of generative content through AI has now captured people's imagination in a way these prior developments have not. Humans are built for conversation. Conversational AI is opening up new possibilities. Over the last several weeks, huge numbers of people have tried out OpenAI's ChatGPT interface. From drafting love letters to helping pena television commercial for Ryan Reynolds, the platform is being tested from all angles — and people have a lot of thoughts about it. That's not exactly surprising: ever since the first depiction of AI in a movie occurred in 1927 in Metropolis, the world has created a fictional relationship between humans and AI. It has been the fuel for both fantastic myth and brutal horror, but imaginings about the AI/human relationship have always shared a common theme: conversations. Humans are wired for conversation. From as early as seven months, we begin our lifetime of conversation, with a journal of Science article in 2007 estimating that the average human speaks roughly 16,000 words per day. But what happens when the number of potential conversation partners moves beyond just humans? That's the AI tipping point that has people so animated. And it has big implications for where we go from here. First: it means that there is no digital experience today that will not eventually be converted to or augmented by conversational AI. But, as we will see, the path to meaningful digital experiences that leverage conversational AI will be fraught with challenges andepic failures. Conversational AI needs more than a testing ground to be truly embedded into every digital experience — and companies need to plan now to maximize these capabilities in their customer journey. How Can AI Create Meaningful Conversations? And How Can Businesses Take Advantage? Conversational AI is only as valuable as the knowledge it possesses. As with all machine learning applications, there exists significant concern around bias, misinformation, and the "garbage-in, garbage-out" problem. To a large extent, initial findings from experiments with ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) demonstrate that the output provided by these models can be an uncanny valley reflection back of the query itself or the data it was trained upon. For this reason, companies should take a step back. They shouldn't view a conversational AI interface as the solution to all types of questions from their employees or customers. But if companies segment the different types of questions asked by humans into four categories, they can immediately see where the opportunities exist for meaningful, AI-driven conversations while limiting the potential errors or missteps in their strategy.