Latin America. Whenever people are asked about their vision of the future, some topics come up again and again: flying cars, hoverboards and virtual reality that are among the most popular ideas. But what people really seem to want are functional robots.
A recent forrester Research study named artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent agents as two of its top five technologies that have the potential to completely transform the world of technology by 2021. In particular, customer service was highlighted as a key sector that will be affected by this.
Asier Bollar, Aspect's Director of Marketing for Latin America reported that while it is still far from having functional robots, walking and talking hidden among us, using artificial intelligence to help us with daily tasks is already a familiar activity for many (such as Apple's Siri), and is expected to be a growing trend in the customer service sector.
"The way we interact with services is changing. While most of us are probably not willing to have a real conversation on the phone with a robot, today there are many more options available when we want to contact a company, and some are already specially equipped with bots."
Is this the emergence of the robot agent?
While some companies have enthusiastically adopted tools like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp to be able to be where their customers are, Bollar warns that they will have to dip their feet when talking about AI and bots.
In this regard, the consulting house indicates that with more than three million users worldwide, messaging applications will also be the first experience of consumers with AI, so they will collide with AI, offering a shift towards new conversational interfaces.
But are you prepared to face those changes? While this technology really holds great promise for the future, the executive points out that there are still big question marks about its launch. To be able to work, he says, chatbots and robot agents will need to have a deep understanding about what is being asked of them.
It will then be the financial services sector that will have to be more careful. According to a Forrester report, the sectors that have made the most progress with AI are retail and communications, but not banking, as the level of customer experience provided by robots is not on par with what human agents can provide.
Another finding from this report indicates that while many of the human-robot interactions reviewed went smoothly, in about a third of the cases, the artificial intelligence was not able to complete the customer's request and even offered a clumsy experience.
"This is something that clearly needs to be improved before people can feel comfortable dealing with robots – especially when it comes to something as important as our finances. The good news, however, is that technology will improve – and it's already doing so at an impressive rate. Over the next two to three years, we can expect it to be ready for use in all sectors, including sensitive sectors such as financial services."
