With more than 6,500 global employees, 250 global partners and dozens of culture and technology awards raked in, Pegasystems Inc. (also referred to as Pega) – the low-code platform for AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation – helps organizations in driving empathetic engagement and optimizing smarter processes for more adaptable and unified customer and team member experiences.
Since late last year, AI has emboldened users to harness it as a useful tool for myriad types of content generation; writing emails and workplace reports, blog and social media posts, e-commerce copy, script generation, meeting transcription and language translation, you name it. Use cases don’t stop there, of course, but there’s no way I could reasonably cram all of them into one digestible article. Suffice to say, AI can also be tapped for providing recommendations, app creation, writing and debugging code, data extraction, and even pseudo-mentoring on various topics and a resource for general brainstorming.
The long-story-short of it? AI is transforming experiences in more ways than one, and Pega is well aware of this fact. What Pega is equally aware of, as are many individuals and organizations, are the waves of hesitancy felt about AI. Because sure, applications that prove successful without drawbacks or red flags are great, but what about privacy invasion? Malicious abuse of AI systems by bad actors? A lack of transparency? True AI neutrality?
The AI pendulum swings both ways, so to speak, and Pega wanted to know more. So, it conducted a study (with research assistance via Savanta) that surveyed roughly 5,000 consumers worldwide about their AI views and what its continued evolution means for future interactions. Respondents from the U.S., the U.K., France, Australia and Japan all chimed in.
For concision’s sake, let’s break these takeaways down:
- Pega found that there’s been a general acceptance of AI in customer experience spaces; 67% of respondents agreed that AI has improved customer and partner service capabilities, and 54% said that companies leveraging well-tested AI “are more likely to offer better benefits than businesses that do not.”
- Despite comfortabilities with AI, the research highlighted a lack of trust, as well. 71% of respondents said they still prefer interaction with human beings. In a few examples pertinent to banking, medical and transportation industries, 68% said they would rather trust a human banker “to make objective, unbiased decisions about whether to give a bank a loan more than an AI solution.” 74% admitted to trusting medical diagnoses from a human doctor more than those made by AI (even with the massive scope of training it receives), and 65% think that in cases involving autonomous vehicles and avoiding car crash situations, “AI should not be allowed to overrule a human driver.”
- In addition to a preference for people, 86% of respondents reported feeling that AI is capable “of evolving itself to behave amorally,” and almost half (48%) said it could be likely that generative AI may eventually become self-aware. (Not quite to the point of enslaving humanity, but people’s concerns are still worrying.)
- More than half (55%) of respondents said they think AI technology has steadily become responsible for producing more photo and video content than humans have, with campaigns to thwart deepfakes still very much active, for instance. In these cases, it boils down less to workplace efficiencies and more to simply being able to tell what’s real from what’s phony. 63% indicated they can’t consistently tell whether a long-form article is human-generated or AI-generated. (Though, for what it’s worth, the article you’re currently reading has been completely written by a human, a.k.a. yours truly.)
So, how has Pega reacted to this respondent data? Well, per Pega General Manager of 1:1 Customer Engagement, Dr. Rob Walker:
“As applications like Midjourney and ChatGPT bring AI to the masses, it is no surprise that we're seeing degrees of conflict. Let's not forget, many are already accepting the benefits this technology can bring; after all, asking Alexa or Siri a question is nothing new for most consumers.”
“However,” Dr. Walker continued, “it's also perhaps inevitable that as the spotlight on this technology intensifies, so does the level of fear and uncertainty around some of the more science-fiction influenced 'doomsday scenarios' surrounding it. As concerns keep growing, the need for organizations to demonstrate greater transparency with their AI systems becomes clearer. AI-produced outcomes, ethical biases and generally how an AI ‘behaves’ are all important to people.”
“For now,” Dr. Walker concluded, “while people seem comfortable with AI on plenty of fronts, many would still rather hold it at arm’s length when it comes to dealing with big, impactful decisions. So, as we’ve seen, the best way to embrace technology like AI may be to use it to supplement and augment existing human skills and workflows. Today, businesses can do this effectively while reaping the benefits and keeping customers and teams happy.”
Edited by
Greg Tavarez
