7 Conversational AI Trends for Your Business
This year can be a turning point in the development of conversational interfaces. Find out how digital assistants will change and what breakthroughs to expect today.
By 2030, the global market volume of conversational AI will reach 41.39 billion dollars, with an average annual growth rate of 23.6% from 2023 to 2030.
AI assistants can already do a lot, from gathering information and answering customer questions to handling payments or creating personalised meal plans.
The emergence of large language models (LLM) in conversational AI opens up new perspectives. Let’s see what the near future holds for us.
1. Conversational AI is Getting Smarter
Generative AI integration is the hottest trend in Conversational AI. LLMs are trained on vast open data, and their integration into Conversational AI allows chatbots and voice assistants to understand humans better.
Many companies, especially industry leaders, are actively exploring its application to enhance their operations, optimise their business processes, and drive digital transformation.
Generative AI has significantly improved dialogue systems, providing more natural and personalised responses by considering a user’s message history. This results in more meaningful conversations, better user comprehension, and a wide range of practical use cases. These applications span from improving customer and employee onboarding processes to enhancing employee productivity and efficiency.
Such smart bots:
- Take into account the previous context of the conversation
- Consider demographic characteristics
- Anticipate user behaviour
- Adapt subtly to their mood
- Capture communication nuances
- Respond more accurately to requests
Furthermore, LLMs can be fine-tuned during use. The more dialogues pass through such a neural network, the more knowledge it can acquire. AI bots can constantly improve and enhance their communication skills.
User feedback can also help companies tailor AI services to their audience. Such intelligent solutions can become a driver for the development of business communications at all levels.
These innovations and the broader landscape of Conversational AI trends are reshaping how businesses connect with their customers and optimise their operations.
2. Not Just Bots: Smart Search
One significant trend in conversational AI is the emergence of smart search systems. Today, users engage in conversations rather than using traditional search queries.
They formulate questions in text and voice as if they were conversing with a live person and receive relevant answers.
Microsoft has integrated this feature into Bing, Google has also connected AI to its search, apps and services, and the Chinese Baidu has implemented the ERNIE neural network.
3. The Functionality of Virtual Assistants is Changing
Simple bots can handle standard requests such as password changes, balance inquiries, delivery schedules, and more without human intervention.
Integrating bots with a company’s internal systems and using AI significantly expand their capabilities. Now, they can provide services beyond consultations, from order payments to product recommendations tailored to customer preferences. In essence, it is about creating personalised content for each user.
Additionally, modern AI bots can analyse and categorise customer requests, directing them to the appropriate call centre specialists or departments. This function enhances the KPI of the contact centre, ensuring that customers are directed to the right employee promptly.
Another trend is the use of AI-powered whisper agents for call centre operators. AI-driven assistant indexes the knowledge base, containing product details and past conversations. Call centre operators can questions during live calls and get pertinent answers, make informed decisions, and adhere to all company regulations.
New AI-powered tools can also automatically provide call summaries by transcribing calls into text and utilising advanced LLMs. This streamlines the process, saves time and ensures structured call notes with important information.
The banking sector is also not falling behind. In this industry, 94% of customer inquiries are directed to call centres and chats, and more than 80% of questions are resolved during the first customer support interaction.
4. Voice Interfaces — a Must-Have at Work and Home
The rapid growth in sales of smart speakers has changed people’s perception of voice assistants for the better.
Now, voice assistants are increasingly seen as a valuable service. Consumers don’t mind being served by a voice bot in real-time, helping them quickly solve problems.
Why are voice bots gaining popularity?
1. Convenience of use. Users don’t have to read monotonous instructions or fill out complex forms. They quickly receive the information they need.
2. Personalised approach. Thanks to integration with internal databases and AI use, bots’ messages are no longer generic. They consider company data, user interaction history, and even our mood.
3. Multichannel capability. We can interact with voice services when and where convenient for us — on smartphones, tablets, smart speakers, or vehicles.
4. Multifunctionality. The number of available functions for smart assistants is constantly growing, including answering questions, scheduling and reminders, navigation, ordering products and services, content and music generation, smart home control, and much more.
Competition has peaked in many industries, especially in fintech, telecom, and retail. Brands don’t want to miss opportunities to attract potential customers and increase loyalty among current ones.
Here, companies face the task of providing a highly personalised experience in a user-friendly way, and it seems that voice assistants are in demand like never before.
5. Messengers as a Driver for Customer Communication
Companies have stopped perceiving messengers solely as channels for PR activities. Now, they serve as a channel for full-fledged business communications with customers alongside websites, apps, and social media. By using messengers, brands increase audience engagement and loyalty.
What types of communication are possible with a bot in a messenger?
1. Marketing interaction. It includes personalised recommendations and promotions, gathering customer information, analysing their preferences, and conducting NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys.
2. Customer support. Bots respond to simple customer questions when operators are busy or unavailable. With the implementation of AI, digital assistants can handle increasingly complex requests without human intervention.
3. Onboarding and employee support. New employees don’t need to spend much time searching for necessary information, and existing employees can quickly submit work-related requests using a chatbot.
6. One-Click Payments via Chatbots
Payments within chat windows have become crucial to modern financial technology. Chatbots are progressively changing our perception of the purchasing process. If previously we could inquire about product details from a digital assistant, now we can make purchases directly in the same window.
Thanks to the integration with payment systems and banking APIs, chatbots can process payments in real-time and send confirmation of completed transactions.
An excellent example of a tech-savvy chatbot is Domino’s Pizza bot that lives on Facebook Messenger. Customers can order and pay from various devices, and the bot remembers their previous orders. It can also track the order and provide an estimated delivery time.
Domino’s Pizza has recently partnered with Microsoft to create the next generation of pizza ordering and store operations with Generative AI technology and cloud computing power. By harnessing the Microsoft Cloud and Azure OpenAI Service, they aim to revamp Domino’s customer experience, making ordering more personalized and straightforward.
In addition to payments, chatbots can check balances, calculate fees, convert currency at the current exchange rate, provide payment history, and much more. Payments directly through chat improve the quality of customer service and contribute to increased customer satisfaction.
7. Internal Company Bots
Companies deploy bots for their personnel for various purposes, but one thing always remains the same: they want to assist employees quickly and efficiently where needed. Typically, internal chatbots answer employee questions, provide onboarding for newcomers, and offer technical support for the staff.
The growing popularity of HR bots is related to expanding their functionality. It includes:
- Initial interviews for mass recruiting
- Exit interviews for employees leaving the company
- Writing job descriptions
- Evaluating candidate CVs in line with job requirements
- Candidate ranking
- Handling applications and certificates
More About Conversational AI
As Conversational AI becomes more complex, it finds applications in increasing business processes. Thanks to large language models, conversational services become more interactive, more user-oriented, and easier to integrate with other technologies.
The new era of Conversational AI is more than just virtual assistants and chatbots. It’s a rapidly evolving field with numerous applications and enormous innovation potential.
