With the speed of technology development, ideas for new technology use cases coming in left and right, and the true value of what it can bring gets lost in the hype. Prime example being AI, artificial intelligence. It covers deep learning, visual insights, text to speech, speech to text, natural language processing, but everyone wants a chatbot. I heard a partner describe it as Vanity AI.

I have a pet peeve with vanity AI, everyone wants one, for the sake of wanting to be part of the crowd. I’ve had a number of conversations recently where people say they want to get AI, they want an AI project. They want to be seen to be ahead of the curve and leveraging technology. The problem is, AI is a fantastically varied technology which can have MASSIVE benefits to many organisations, but it doesn’t always have to start with a chatbot.

I’m not putting down chatbots as an uncool piece of technology and in the right space they provide a great new point of interaction with your customers, but there is so much more to AI than chatbots. Couple ideas below of other AI projects that could provide more immediate benefit, as well as providing information for your Chatbot Project in the future. Indigestible content that helps decrease the learning curve for your customer facing AI.

• Sentiment analysis on your customer emails: This provides out of the box indication on the perceptions of your customers and their experiences.
• Marketing analysis: This provides visibility of how your marketing activity is being received and is usually embedded in marketing engines especially the social side.
• Internal Assistant: Helping your internal staff augment their knowledge using natural language questioning creates immense benefit, especially with your untrained front line staff.
• Phone call automated dictation: People still like to talk to people, but audio is hard to digest or gain insight from. By gaining a textual record, you can leverage your Sentiment analysis tools to understand how customers are engaging with your call centre.
• Elastic Search: Utilising image recognition technology to research PDF documentation or annotated diagrams.

The time to engage and create your AI project is now, but ensuring that you are delivering the most value to your business, customers and shareholders can require some re-alignment of expectations.

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