AI Can Read, Get People to Open Up

Store employees now look on as shoppers scan and bag their own groceries. Yesterday someone in a parking garage punched the button and handed my husband his ticket. And the nice young lady at the rental car desk this weekend read us what was on the screen so we didn’t have to read ourselves.

Clearly automation is already replacing some checkout clerks. I jokingly predicted the human element soon will be phased out for the parking garage job (not sure why she needed to be part of that particular process). And it seems to me the rental car process is a repeatable task that could easily be automated and expedited.

I’m not advocating for it. It’s just an observation.

That gets to what many people consider the down side of artificial intelligence and automation – that these technologies displace human jobs. And contact center and customer service jobs are among the most at risk to be outdated by AI solutions.

AI solution providers, pundits, and writers often remind us that there will always be room for humans, who are needed for their understanding of complex situations. But AI is catching up with us humans on that too in some circles.

For example, AI technology from Alibaba and Microsoft (News - Alert) performed better than humans in a reading comprehension test staged earlier this year. Alibaba’s chief scientist of natural language processing Luo Si in lauding the results noted this technology has an array of uses, including everything from customer service to medical inquiries and museum tutorials.

Meanwhile, MIT (News - Alert) Sloan Management Review notes that AI can drive better customer satisfaction through greater personalization.

“For example, if customers know they are interacting with a computer and not using another person’s time, they may spend more time customizing their selection,” writes Sam Ransbotham. “I’ve certainly spent far more time online investigating travel options than I would ever subject a human travel agent to. With better customization, customer satisfaction can increase.”

Ransbotham goes on to say that AI-enabled customer service could also potentially lead to more informed customers, greater honesty on behalf of the customers, and faster interactions with customers.

“When interacting with other humans, people hesitate to ask what they perceive to be dumb or repetitive questions. We can be reluctant to admit that we still don’t understand,” he writes. “But when interacting with machines, we are free to clarify to our heart’s content.”

Edited by Maurice Nagle