Copyright bbc
Getting the balance right between being on brand and genuinely helping customers is a tricky one for businesses to grapple with as they migrate to AI. Some 85% of customer service leaders are exploring, piloting or deploying AI chatbots, according to Gartner. But it also found that only 20% of such projects are fully meeting expectations. "You can have a much more natural conversation with AI," says Garner analyst Emily Potosky. "But the downside is the chatbot could hallucinate, it could give you out-of-date information, or tell you completely the wrong thing. For parcel delivery I would say rules-based agents are great because there are only so many permutations of questions about someone's package." Resources and money are among the key reasons businesses may be considering the move from human to AI customer service. But Ms Potosky points out that it isn't a given that AI will be cheaper than human agents. "This is a very expensive technology," she says. The first thing that any business wanting to replace humans with AI will have to do is ensure that they have extensive training data. "There's this idea that knowledge management becomes less important because generative AI can solve the fact that their knowledge is not particularly well organised, but actually the opposite is the case," adds Ms Potosky. "Knowledge management is more important when deploying generative AI."
