Harnessing the power of conversational AI fused with generative AI can lead to unparalleled growth and lasting success for companies.
ChatGPT 3.5's release in November 2022 was an AI milestone, paralleling the iPhone's impact. Generative AI, particularly in conversational contexts, is gaining traction, heralding a revolutionary change in human-tech interaction while creating a seismic economic impact.
The world changed in November 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT 3.5 – the iPhone moment for AI. We are only now grasping the enormity of the opportunity presented to us as we start to comprehend the breakthrough enabled by the rise of generative AI. One area where generative AI is showing particular promise is in the field of conversational AI, with 83% of executives worldwide describing it as the most relevant for their business. This business technology uses natural language processing and machine learning to enable computers to communicate with humans naturally and intuitively. When combined with the power of generative AI, which can create new content such as text, images, and music, conversational AI's potential to revolutionize how we interact with technology becomes enormous.
TL;DR
According to a report by McKinsey & Company, generative AI has the potential to add between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion annually across 63 use cases analysed —by comparison, the United Kingdom's entire GDP in 2021 was $3.1 trillion.
As companies rush to understand, adopt and implement generative AI and work out how to combine it with conversational AI, understanding the technology's transformation potential to deliver value for businesses and the global economy is key. Chatbots currently represent the top use of AI in all enterprises. The conversational AI market is experiencing remarkable growth, with a staggering CAGR of 22.6%, and their adoption rates are expected to almost double over the next two to five years.
Generative AI and conversational AI are two technologies that are converging to create a powerful force for business growth. Their power combined can automate customer service, sales, and other tasks that humans currently perform. Generative AI enables companies to create new products and services and enhance the quality of existing ones, and as it continues to develop and mature, it has the potential to open wholly new frontiers in creativity and innovation.
For example, one of the critical ways that conversational AI with generative AI can drive economic growth is by improving customer operations. By using natural language processing and machine learning, conversational AI can understand and respond to customer queries more human-like.
Research conducted at a Fortune 500 software firm employing slightly over 5000 agents found that integrating conversational AI agents infused with generative AI resulted in an average 14% improvement in customer issue resolution per hour, along with a 9% reduction in time spent on call handling issues.
The most significant impact was on less-experienced and lower-skilled workers who, in only two months, became as productive as agents with six months of tenure. Additionally, AI assistance improved customer sentiment, reduced requests for managerial intervention, and improved employee retention.
Generative AI and conversational AI can also be used to create personalized content for customers, further enhancing their experience. This can help improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. It can identify opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell, collect insights to improve product offerings, generate leads and increase sales and revenue. McKinsey estimates that if technologies like conversational AI could increase productivity in the retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry by 1.2% - 2.0%, this would add an additional $400bn - $660bn of value.
This video showcases how DRUID conversational AI merged with generative AI enables plug-and-play integrations to help you transform user experiences by deploying and scaling fast on any communication channel desired.
Generative AI and conversational AI can drive economic growth by automating routine tasks such as data entry and analysis that would otherwise require manual labour, such as scheduling appointments, answering questions, providing support, managing inventory, or processing orders. This can lead to increased productivity and efficiency, improved quality of work completed, as well as cost savings and freeing up employees to focus on higher-value tasks.
The potential for generative and conversational AI to drive economic growth is exponential. But all this is only possible when we empower employees, foster their creativity, drive innovation and enhance their decision-making.
Whilst there is debate suggesting AI will replace roles, generative AI promises to enhance human decision-making, creativity and efficiency, and revolutionize problem-solving and multitasking, thus allowing us to reimagine existing systems and foster a new culture of innovation.
For example, generative AI can augment human creativity by promoting divergent thinking, challenging expertise bias, assisting in idea evaluation, supporting idea refinement, and facilitating user collaboration. By making associations among remote concepts and producing ideas drawn from them, generative AI can support divergent thinking and help employees create and identify novel ideas.
In other cases, generative AI can drive value by working with workers, augmenting their work to accelerate their productivity. Its ability to rapidly digest mountains of data and draw conclusions from it enables the technology to combine with conversational AI and offer insights and options that can dramatically enhance knowledge worker productivity. McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) estimated that knowledge workers spent about a fifth of their time, or one day each work week, searching for and gathering information. The benefits to companies would be huge if generative AI could take on this search task, dramatically increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of workers.
Conversational AI infused with generative AI can free up employees to focus on higher-value tasks, leading to increased productivity and efficiency. For example, utilising conversational AI infused with generative AI in HR can dramatically increase human efficiency by automating administrative processes, delivering better employee experiences and, importantly, augmenting decision-making. HR staff can use their conversational AI to create automatic job descriptions, employment contracts, automatic candidate outreach messages, and even customer interview scripts, helping them find and prepare for the best candidate. Additionally, it can be utilised to filter resumes and employment forms to help identify which candidate is a good fit for a role.
Conversational AI infused with generative AI can also support new employees throughout the onboarding process by answering their queries about HR policies, benefits and procedures or having them complete compliance-related materials and virtual exercises before their starting date and providing them with all the necessary information, as and when required.
Generative AI's potential in conversational shopping, customer support, banking, insurance and more is undeniable. However, the excitement generated by these new opportunities should not drown out the fact that conversation is the most natural form of communication. Humans use conversation to get things done. Generative AI-powered conversational systems learn from interactions with people, which helps create more flexible and adaptable conversational systems that are more human-like. As a result, they provide more accurate and personalised responses when solving user queries or requests.
See how the DRUID platform, integrated with ChatGPT, amplifies the personalization of the interaction with a user through a conversational AI voicebot. Able to perfectly understand the user's needs and to filter the essence of the information provided, the voicebot generated the correct answers tailored to the user's needs.
Conversational AI can also drive economic growth by enabling new forms of collaboration. By using natural language processing and machine learning, conversational AI can facilitate communication between people who speak different languages or have different levels of technical expertise. This empowers teams to make better-informed decisions and develop more effective strategies, helping businesses tap into new markets and collaborate more effectively with partners worldwide.
Each chat can be considered a building block in a digital relationship, with every new conversation building upon the last. This creates a more personalised experience and strengthens information relevance and user loyalty thanks to the workers who continue to train the conversational AI application.
The arrival of generative AI applications, like ChatGPT, has been nothing short of seismic. Whilst McKinsey estimates generative AI could add the equivalent of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion to the global economy, that number could well end up much higher.
The combination of generative with conversational AI has the potential to empower employees' productivity, foster creativity, drive innovation, and enhance decision-making by promoting divergent thinking, improving business processes, and creating new business models and new economic benefits.
The economic impact of generative AI and conversational AI will be felt across all industries. Realising this potential will require investments in technology and people to enable them to adapt to new operating models, roles and responsibilities. It is no longer a question about whether to adopt generative AI but how to apply it effectively.
Generative AI has taken the stage due to its best representation so far, ChatGPT. If you feel overwhelmed by all the jargon, this article is for you.
Conversational AI's ability to emulate human interaction has spurred attention across industries, but along with the enthusiasm, myths have also...
Businesses should get ready to enjoy the benefits of generative AI while realistically assessing the challenges that come along with its advancement.