We predict a warm Contact Center AI winter
We’re beginning to hear rumors of another AI winter — the term often used to describe long periods of disillusionment, lack of investment, and lack of progress in Artificial Intelligence. One occurred in the late seventies. The longest occurred in the late eighties through to the late nineties.
Prominent among the doomsayers is Gary Marcus, author of Rebooting AI who recently claimed:
“You see very few people out there today saying, ‘Yes, we use this everyday, and it’s absolutely essential to what we do,’”
A recent article by Ben Evans neatly analyzes some of the factors that are leading to these claims.
Evans shared Reuters research showing ChatGPT use by country. A third of Americans have tried it. But little more than 1 in 20 use it daily. Elsewhere the numbers are generally much lower.
So this isn’t an iPhone, or the internet.. or is it?
What about business?
Evans shares another chart on that. Since fall last year to early this year, the number of pilots has gone up a lot, but the number of deployments has actually gone down.
So it doesn’t work in the real world… or does it?
Evans repeatedly comes back to a point I’ve made many times: Generative AI is not a product.
He puts it like this (LLMs being the core tech underlying most generative AI right now):
“LMM by itself is not a product — it’s a technology that can enable a tool or a feature, and it needs to be unbundled or rebundled into new framings, UX and tools to be become useful”
Will there be an AI winter? A trough of disillusionment?
In some areas, yes. As we can see in the chart above, adoption of Gen AI is gaining significant traction in some areas, but adoption is much slower in others.
It’s kinda obvious… the risks of getting things wrong in Legal, HR, Sales, Finance, IT, and operations are quite high, and the consequences are significant.
But in coding, the risk is much lower… compilers and quality assurance and other tools will catch problems.
In Marketing, it’s a numbers game… so a few hallucinations — where Gen AI makes stuff up — isn’t going to cause too much of a problem. After all, marketeers are making stuff up all the time 🤣
And in customer service, we already have the processes, infrastructure and culture to train junior agents, track their performance, spot quality and compliance issues, and fix them, fast. We’ve said before in this series Contact Center is the ideal playground for Gen AI. We also dropped a new YouTube video on the same topic just last week.
So is Gen AI like the internet? Or the iPhone? Yes. It’s a general purpose technology.
Does it work in the real world?
Yes, it does. But not everywhere. Yet. But in the contact center, definitely!
We’re feeling pretty confident of a warm winter, so don’t let the doomsayers and lack of traction in other industries stop you from building an AI-first contact center.
If you didn’t catch it already, check out our webinar replay on The AI-First Contact Center where we go deep into the possibilities.
Or for something more bite-sized, check out our YouTube playlist on Gen AI & The AI-First Contact Center.
