If there’s one hallmark of twenty-first century life, it’s data. The amount of data that we posses increases exponentially each month, and the human brain – even the best human brains – can’t keep up. For years, we’ve been using search engines such as Google to farm through the mountains of data at home and at work. Increasingly, that’s not enough. Instead ,we’re relying on artificial intelligence- (AI) based solutions such as Siri and Alexa, and in the workplace, applications have built in AI to help us get through the data and make sense of it.
Gartner’s recent research report, “Forecast: The Business value of Artificial Intelligence, Worldwide, 2017 to 2025,” the company examined the AI industry in terms of industry gross output (IGO) in four segments: decision support/augmentation; agents; decision automation; and smart products. For the contact center industry, “agents” is perhaps the most important. This includes automated “virtual agents,” or chatbots that can help customers with simple questions and requests, taking pressure off human service agents who are then free to solve more complex problems. Virtual agents keep labor costs low and human agents more engaged with their jobs by eliminating tedious, repetitive work.
AI-driven agents aren’t just important to the contact center industry: it’s the largest component of business AI. Garner found that virtual “agents account for 43 percent of the global AI-derived business value in 2017 and 24 percent by 2030, as other AI types mature and contribute to business value.” In other words, agent-related AI is now worth about $300 billion (in 2017) and is expected to climb to $1.2 trillion by 2030.
So what about all those agents who might be put out of a job by robots? While the contact center industry may change somewhat, Garner found that AI is actually a positive net job motivator, creating more jobs than it eliminates and adding to agents’ career growth.
“AI dramatically improves the efficiency, processing speed and transaction volume of customer interactions,” wrote Haris Saeed for Customer Think. “Almost 90 percent of companies report faster complaint resolution, and over 80 percent say they enhance call volume processing using AI.”
For more information about the Future of Work and how AI will drive the workplace forward into the twenty-first century, plan on attending the Future of Work Expo in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from February 12 to 14, 2020. For more information and to register, visit www.futureofworkexpo.com.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
