Artificial Intelligence has had a significant impact to businesses and the ability to use AI is always progressing to accommodate other functions
What is AI?
AI is Artificial Intelligence; a system which demonstrates some intelligent behaviours such as learning, planning, knowledge and problem-solving.
Artificial Intelligence is all about making things easier, some prime examples are Amazon echo, Siri and Cortana and similar devices. They interact with you by you speaking with it. It responds, giving you human response and carrying out your requests.
Traditional and Modern Forms of Artificial Intelligence
There are some standard examples that people forget are AI which has been around for years such as spam filters, out-of-office replies and product recommendations, plus many more, however, businesses are utilising AI in a more effective way for bigger processes.
For instance, quite a few of our clients within the retail sector and particularly our clients who have call centres; are keen to adopt the live chat facility with a chatbot integrated.
It means that when there is an issue, someone can go to their website, open up the chat facility and engage (unknowingly) with a chatbot. The chatbot would have some pre-determined answers but would answer in a “human” way, if they couldn’t answer it or they ran out of pre-determined answers, it would direct it (seamlessly) to the right person in the right department (this is programmed in before it goes live.)
In call centres, this is particularly useful because usually with a high volume of calls it is difficult to speak with everyone quickly so the phone system could direct them to the site or whilst the customer service consultant is speaking on the phone, they could be typing a response to a live chat question, too.
Artificial Intelligence replacing business functions?
The idea of Artificial Intelligence is to use as a resource to help meet the needs of the customers. For instance, as mentioned, the live chat bot, however we are seeing more and more application within other functions such as marketing and security.
Most people have heard of marketing automation but there are more advanced systems which are using AI technology to automate which campaign is triggered based on the actions of the prospect / customer. E.g. X number of visits to a specific web page which trigger one campaign along with a pop up on the page itself
Artificial Intelligence being used in Security is developing quickly but one of the simplest forms is where there are a list of people who are authorised to access areas, with their faces recorded in the system. The system will identify them as those people and say X has accessed this area, or you can simply change your setting to ignore those people because they are authorised.