Sorry, but AI will not take over customer experience

Is this something that you often come across while browsing through a website or simply while you’re checking the status of your order on Swiggy or Zomota?

In today’s blog, I will be taking you through the history and the near future of AI Chatbots and Virtual assistants. Also telling you whether they’ll prove to be a benefit or a deficit in customer experience.

Spoiler Alert: The future might not be as bright as we think of it now(AIs, not ours!).

If you’re somebody who owns an iPhone and thinks Siri is one of a kind or somebody who recently had a chat with Alexa or Google assistant and thought you are blessed to be born at such a time when AI has taken over our very basic tasks; if that’s the case then you might want to continue reading.

The first AI-enabled chatbot was made in 1966, which was called ELIZA(Yes, that’s 54 years from now!) and since then there have been various improvements. While ELIZA was designed to simply imitate human interaction, researchers recognized the potential of similar chatbots to provide real value to users in a wide range of contexts and that led us to Siri and Alexa. Though modern days AI chatbots are a giant leap from ELIZA, they are yet to meet their full potential but even if they do in maybe say 5-10 years will they be capable enough to replace humans and can take over customer experience?

The existing AI job market:

First, let’s get the facts straight. The answer to the above question is a simple ‘No’. The chatbot market was valued at USD17.17 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach USD102.29 billion by 2025. According to research by Gartner, 25 percent of all customer service operations will use virtual assistants by 2020, and that, in the coming year, organizations will invest more in AI-driven bots and Chatbots than they will in mobile apps. So, do these forecasts mark the demise of the human customer service agent? Is the future of customer support 100 percent driven by machines?

Not even close.

Although AI-related jobs have seen steady growth in 2020 but instead of replacing humans, AI is expected to multiply existing jobs and improve productivity i.e., enabling people to do their jobs more efficiently.

The journey from Machine Language to Artificial Intelligence:

The above figures tell us that AI is going to play a significant role in the future but let us understand if it can cater to every customer’s need.

Let’s understand the procedure this way. In ML, it takes the input, let’s say ‘X’ here and provides you with an output, let’s say ‘Y’ It ‘learns’ how to ‘map X to Y, and that’s where the progress has come from. Today we have more data to work with, and we have much more powerful computers to process the data. For this very purpose companies collect extensive data to feed their AI’s. The more data it gets fed with, the more it will grow(Think of it as a baby or a newborn!).

Now, what we need to understand here is; are our needs so simple & can they be mapped just from X to Y?

However simple a human being maybe be, he/she will have complex needs that won’t fill in the pathway from X & Y. They will have sub-categories that require a deeper set of questions and are sometimes unusually complex for even another human being to answer, let alone a machine!

The most you can do with an AI is can do is feed it with a plethora of customer for it to do bare minimum tasks like checking the status of an order or making a payment but when it comes to customers demanding an engaging interaction or a human persona, AI simply fails.

The next time somebody tells you AI is the answer to all of your problems, ask yourself, is your problem as simple as ‘map X to Y’?

The neglected truth:

Human intelligence, your intelligence, has its limits. Or does it?

You can think about that for yourself but for AI, it does.

The word intelligence comprises of various human traits: hearing, seeing, capacity for logic, understanding, self-awareness, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. Now the question arises, is AI capable of all that and if not, how does it even deserve that title?

When it comes to scaling, AI only meets the hearing and seeing the end of the intelligence scale. It isn’t capable of innovation, emotional knowledge, and planning. Although soon we might make AI capable of problem-solving and reasoning how will we teach it how to deal with an angry customer or how to empathize when needed.

When a human being says he/she is intelligent, we question their intelligence level even when it is justified. So, the next time you think AI is the future that has left you with no future, compare your intelligent traits with it and you will see a clear winner!

Down the lane it’s all about collaboration:

AI is better than humans at some things but it is worse when it comes to others. One such boon is speed. AI can perform tasks at a much better rate than humans. This can be used to match the customer's needs and assign them to the desired agent for better understanding.

When it comes to how AI is generating jobs, the majority of them will be and are still being created in conversational chatbot designing where an individual designs the chatbot in such a way that it matches the brand’s image and also what exactly the customer is there to look for.

AI can answer the questions, but we also need a conversation designer, who can craft an experience that your customers will love. what could be better than improving the customer interface and asking the right questions when a customer interacts either for the first or the millionth time and AI can’t do that, therefore, there comes the role of human into play.