The Growth and Potential of AI
Last year, I predicted that 2018 would be the year that artificial intelligence (AI) becomes pervasive. Now, as we kick off 2019, AI is showing signs of becoming even more ubiquitous.
Prior to 2018, AI was mostly in the domain of large tech companies that deployed machine learning to increase efficiency and scale behind the scenes. Last year, more and more businesses became conversational about AI, even if they hadn't actually started using it yet. Enterprises are finally beginning to learn of AI’s advantages and incorporate them into the mainstream, which is now especially evident in the areas of employee productivity and customer engagement. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a company in 2019 that doesn’t have an AI project of some sort going. What lies beyond this year, as computers come ever nearer to human capabilities, is even more inspiring to consider.
Growth in AI has been booming in the customer support realm, and that will intensify this year. This Forbes article notes that by 2020, around 85% of all customer service interactions will take place sans a human agent. In all likelihood, you and I have used these kinds of services, with interactions so human-like that we weren’t even aware we were talking with a machine and not a human!
If you’ve had to track a package, make a travel reservation, refill a prescription or schedule an appointment at a large medical facility, chances are that you’ve talked with a robot this past year. Customers seek to use their preferred digital channels -- like mobile messaging, social media and email -- to engage with brands. Therefore, companies have to support these digital channels as part of their caretaking of customer experience. As the head of Innovation at RingCentral, it’s my job to make sure that we are at the forefront of such offerings for our own customers. In keeping with the rising tide of AI, we acquired a company that created a leading cloud-based digital customer engagement platform that enables enterprises to manage all their digital customer interactions through a single intelligent platform. In order to survive and thrive, companies have to meet their customers where they are, and these days, companies are on their phones and apps just like individuals are. It verges on miraculous to think of how we’ve distilled what used to be giant server rooms into a cloud that responds to us knowledgeably and in an instant on a device that fits in our hands!
The speed of innovation in AI, especially in customer support and sales productivity, has been rampant. This past year, the standard became companies using AI to improve decision making and support via predictive business software. There’s no question now of using heavy-duty machine learning analytics as a standard business practice versus the past of spreadsheets and databases. What’s imminent is for decision support to look into the future instead of backward to do things like predict a sales pipeline and forecast how that will transform into deals. New AI companies are being funded for this left and right, and it will be exciting to see what they do with these possibilities this year.
Looking even further down the road, there are those who believe that computers will be just as smart as humans in about two decades. I’m a fan of reading about the subject of singularity and quantum computing, and it's fascinating to hear about their potential. But will having AI as smart as humans be a good thing, or will it ignite apocalyptic devastation, as sci-fi movies would have us believe? Personally, I think AI stands to improve our lives in ways that we cannot even imagine yet, especially in the realm of our homes.
While enterprise can rely on AI more and more for customer service and sales predictions, we cannot rely on it in our homes to do things like cook and clean for us -- yet. Moley’s robotic kitchen will reach consumers any day now. It’s hard to imagine such a thing becoming commonplace in the home when cooking is so highly personal. But if we are to believe the hype, robots will soon do this and more for us, maximizing our leisure time and improving our lives. Can we look forward to robots in our garden? Why not, considering that some think AI in agriculture may soon feed the world?
Long before we get to a future in which robots take over our chores for us, let alone feed the world, we have to make successful AI technologies more accepted and more commonplace. Unfortunately, some AI that has great potential -- like that which succeeded at predicting pneumonia better than radiologists at Stanford -- is still far from being used in everyday life.
We’re quick to want to use our voices to turn our lights off and on, but we’re slow to want to rely on tech to do things like remind us to measure our blood pressure -- and then do it and report it to our doctors for us. AI companies need to invest in using their algorithms not just to prove their success but also to become relatable to everyday consumers and to build their confidence.
Originally published on Forbes