Well, you probably wouldn’t start at all if you've read any of the hype surrounding AI. You may also be baffled by the personification of machine learning services, or the imagery of floating blue heads. And thankfully, the technology is far from the Hollywood-portrayed AI that goes berserk and betrays its human creators. 

In reality, AI is just another toolset in your customer experience toolkit. Much like how web designers once needed to understand the difference between combo-boxes and radio buttons, the new challenge for digital professionals is when AI can best be used. 

By viewing these technologies as a toolset, we see that it simply builds on the purpose of a digital experience: to fulfil a human need or desire through a technologically simplified workflow.

AI solutions improve your customer experience and digital product by: 

• refining the relevance (or accuracy) of an outcome
  
• reducing cognitive load
  
• Increasing productivity, and
  
• decreasing ownership cost. 
  

Using natural language processing (NLP) as an example, we’ll first look at how AI-backed search can refine and simplify your customer experience. Then we’ll see how you can increase productivity and decrease costs through automation.

Simplify tasks with natural language processing

By leveraging NLP-backed search, a knowledge base can return relevant help results where they once fell wide of the the mark. It does this by analysing previous interactions and builds an understanding of which were successful. From this understanding, it can then adapt which results are shown. This means your customers can easily find the result that best suits their needs, and helps reduce their cognitive load. 

Improve efficiency with automation

The use of AI-backed moderation tools help to create a safe and reliable user environment for your customers. In the past, forms which included profile images often needed a human moderator. This is a waste of otherwise productive people’s time. 

Nowadays, modern moderation queues are largely automated. Computer vision is highly accurate at detecting faces or inappropriate images. This AI solution is almost invisible to your customer, but it reduces the overall operating cost of your digital product, while maintaining a high-quality customer experience.

As with any new technology, applying this toolset introduces some risk with its many rewards.

In the same way that humans make errors when entering data, errors occur with AI-backed processes as well. Generally, these errors are caused by poorly trained models or limitations in their capabilities. To get maximum value from your investment in these technologies, you need to investigate risk, much as you would with any IT project. 

You can better manage your risk by determining the likely accuracy of the output, and investigating the consequence of an incorrect result. Thankfully, given the nature of the technology, there’s often good sets of data on a solution’s accuracy. This means you can reliably make decisions based on quantified levels of risk.

Ultimately, we see this toolset as a humanising technology. By reducing our physical interactions with digital experiences, we hope to introduce some “magic” – a sense that we get more out of a digital experience than the effort we put in. At least, until the floating blue heads take over.

Ready to bring AI to your business? Get in touch for a friendly chat – with a human, not a chatbot.