What Does 2020 Hold for Conversational AI?
Conversation AI being an integral part of today’s innovation is set to transform several enterprise businesses.
Another kind of Artificial Intelligence is set to take over the technology market. This time it is none other than Conversational AI. Its use across enterprise business has grown quite significantly at a fast pace with new projects initiated every now and then. Conversational AI is an integral part of many other AI projects across various other business genres.
As enterprises begin to mature in the market and gravitate to smarter conversational AI solutions that bring true value, they will leave failed solutions behind and migrate to proven technologies – technologies that can continue to improve and build solutions across their businesses.
The techies are seeing a huge maturity in the market, and that’s being measured by organizations beginning to realize the value they can have from conversational artificial intelligence, and it’s also coming from enterprises trialing, testing, and failing with different solutions that exist.
2020 will see the most definitive transformation of chatbots into Conversational AI bots. The rudimentary rule-based chatbot no longer delights customers. An AI conversant bot, unlike a chatbot, is a cognitive bot that can decipher complex scenarios and understand human sentiments. Its NLP capabilities empower it for a personalized conversation with customers, which involves understanding human sentiments and acting accordingly. As enterprises focus more on delighting the customer and achieving excellent Net Promoter Scores, chatbots shall soon be replaced by conversational AI bots in the coming years.
Conversation AI bots of 2020 will deliver highly personalized and contextual conversations that give them a human touch. For example, they can understand and remember conversation context, past dialogs, and user preferences, etc., and ‘wow’ the users with their suaveness. They can also carry the context across multiple conversations to understand the past and future requirements. With their humanesque conversations, they can understand your sentiments and moods, and respond accordingly. These bots can be widely leveraged to cross-sell and up-sell products/services to users.
Moreover, for a long time, providers of AI development services used a rule-based or decision tree approach to run online chatbots. Although rule-based chatbots provide accurate customer responses, their intelligence is limited to pre-defined FAQs and common user queries. The advent of data-driven machine learning intelligence is empowering chatbots and conversational AI applications to facilitate domain-specific user interactions. 2020 will witness notable progress in the development of domain-specific conversational AI applications with the various business benefits also owing to the demands increased by COVID-19.
Furthermore, Forbes predicts there will be an upsurge for new skill sets as conversational AI puts business users on the front line. Building conversational AI systems is no longer the exclusive domain of developers and computational linguists. Enterprises are increasingly including business users on the implementation teams, allowing them to collaborate in developing and maintaining conversational AI applications — proving that new technology will bring with it changes in the skill sets needed within the business and potentially new employment opportunities.
Scriptwriters will ensure the flow of the conversation includes everything from brand values to open-ended questions that better understand the customer’s needs. Team leaders will need to know not just the business processes, but the quirks of those processes that could trip a chatbot up. Designers will improve visual understanding, such as engaging avatars capable of reacting to emotions within the conversation. And the list goes on.
Key here will be their ability to collaborate as a team in building and enhancing the conversational AI application, which means the development platform must-have features like workflows, automated testing, version control and roll-back, as well as a graphical interface that’s easy to use.
