ChatGPT and the Channel: ‘We Haven’t Seen Innovation Like This in a Very Long Time'
In three to five years, customers will be able to have complete conversations with AI-backed chatbots.
March 1, 2023
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NEC officials see the benefits of ChatGPT over any potential drawbacks.
“[Already] we’re creating a business strategy around [generative AI],” said Mark Hebner, SVP and head of enterprise business in the Americas at NEC.
Take generative AI’s ability to provide functionality in multiple languages. Whether it’s for a channel partner or a vendor, it may break down virtual communication barriers in markets that some may not have otherwise pursued.
“I’m sure there are great sales folks in India, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, right? If you are able to break that communication barrier, that makes a big difference to margins,” Hebner said.
Not to be left out, Google will soon launch its experimental AI service. By late March, Google will announce the incorporation of Bard — powered by LaMDA — into the contact center space.
Specifically, Google Cloud partners with UJET, the company that provides ongoing development of the tech giant’s Contact Center AI solution. UJET is keeping mum until next month about Bard’s integration into its contact center technology. However, the company did answer questions about the broader implications of generative AI for that industry.
“It seems like a whole new thing just got created overnight and everybody’s interested it,” said Vasili Triant, chief operating officer at UJET. “Frankly, it’s kind of fun to see, but the reality is, for customer service applications, ChatGPT itself is way too early.”
[MIT Technology Review gets into a decades-long history of how we arrived at ChatGPT.]
Yet, contact center companies are pushing forward. In three to five years, customers will be able to have complete conversations with AI-backed chatbots. This mostly erases the need for contact center agents in their current capacity, Triant said. But this won’t be the “death” of the contact center agent.
Humans still must feed information into AI models. A new era of agents may handle limited interactions with customers and instead could be used to help train the models. Essentially, people will serve as the backend of the AI technology at contact centers.
UJET has already used machine learning and large language models for its virtual agents, both in text chat and voice. What generative AI promises the contact center space, and other applications, is the ability to understand customer intent to a degree society hasn’t seen from AI. Here’s one future scenario: An angry customer may ask the same question as an upbeat customer. However, each would get a different response from a chatbot to match the customer’s tone.
Google’s possible advantage in the generative AI race may be its longevity in online search. The tech company has decades of data that go beyond all the “stuff you can scrape from the web,” Triant said. It houses data about how people make decisions when they search online, and it has built an entire business model surrounding the decision-making. This information will undoubtably help Google develop generative AI tools around intent, according to Triant.
Anuj Arora agrees that intent is the goal. Arora is vice president of solutions and strategy at Ada, an AI-powered customer service automation platform. A year-and-a-half before ChatGPT became public, Ada began working with OpenAI’s technology. Ada uses applications that talk to each other, or APIs, powered by OpenAI’s underlying language model. [According to digital services firm West Monroe, API integration will be one of the top three areas of tech investment that ChatGPT will influence.]
Some organizations operating within the channel are already utilizing Ada’s OpenAI-infused chatbot software long before OpenAI released ChatGPT to a global audience.
“When it comes to conversational AI, or support automation, the name of the game is automated resolutions. When people come and talk to you, how good are you at resolving their inquiry?” Arora said. “Ada is applying OpenAI’s foundational language model and fine tuning it for customer support and your brand specifically.”
This is the critical point, Arora said. For companies such as Ada that are applying generative AI to its chatbots for specific customer uses, it’s different from what the public experiences while using ChatGPT. ChatGPT gathers data from the internet that may or may not be correct.
What companies like Ada and UJET do, or intend to do, is use AI to find answers within an organization’s existing system of records and “not from the whole world,” Arora said of the internet. This company-specific information is confined and likely more accurate, he added. For example, a chatbot could pull knowledge from previous agent transcripts to answer a customer query.
It’s the beginning of a brave new world of business that changes not just in months but in less than a day, Arora said. Major companies that haven’t caught onto this AI technology are already behind, he added.
“The fact of the matter is we haven’t seen innovation like this in a very long time,” Arora said.
Channel partners who pay attention to this changing environment will be at an advantage, Triant said. He added they will have to move quickly to keep up with the realities of the time.
“I think the partners who understand how those [artificial intelligence] models work are going to win,” he said. “But not all partners are going to go there. There are a lot of partners that just sell; they don’t do services and customization. Ultimately, the technology is going to become more dependent on the channel providers who do the full breadth of sales and service.”
It’s no mystery that artificial intelligence plays an important role in marketing and sales. According to Allison Bergamo, principal at Bergamo Marketing Group, in the next three to five years, 80% of marketers’ tasks will be intelligently automated.
However, that’s just the beginning.
“AI-powered tools empower marketers to create customized digital first experiences for today’s B2B buyers,” Bergamo said. “And what we’re seeing now with B2B buying is that millennials, the first generation of digital natives, are coming into executive positions. They have purchasing authority. They want as little, if any, interaction with a sales representative as possible.”
Bergamo cited Gartner. The organization expects that by 2025, 80% of sales interactions between buyers and suppliers will be done through digital channels, she said. How these digital channels will be influenced by generative AI remains to be seen, but Bergamo said she thinks it’s important to be selective with these AI tools, as many of them are still evolving.
Case in point, Microsoft’s integration of ChatGPT into Bing: The search engine cited some inaccurate facts, or missed details entirely, in response to users’ initial queries. Although the AI technology gets better with time, Microsoft still has to work out weak points with the new Bing.
This raises questions about information gathering for the channel.
“How good is the data that you have regarding your customer interactions today?” Bergamo said.
AI tools may help leverage insights and improve performance of marketers and sales agents — and in the case of the contact center agent, even replace them — but who is serving as the gatekeeper?
Case in point, Microsoft’s integration of ChatGPT into Bing: The search engine cited some inaccurate facts, or missed details entirely, in response to users’ initial queries. Although the AI technology gets better with time, Microsoft still has to work out weak points with the new Bing.
This raises questions about information gathering for the channel.
“How good is the data that you have regarding your customer interactions today?” Bergamo said.
AI tools may help leverage insights and improve performance of marketers and sales agents — and in the case of the contact center agent, even replace them — but who is serving as the gatekeeper?
ChatGPT arrived like a tsunami, and the IT channel was well within its path.
In a matter of months, the vanguard chatbot created by OpenAI has influenced – and promises to influence – so many segments of society that counting how and where is pointless. Whether it’s writing a short story or laying out the fundamentals of deep philosophical concepts, the generative AI tool scrapes the internet and seemingly answers almost anything a user asks of it. [There’s a great summary at Makeuseof.com about how ChatGPT works in case you’re just catching up to the technology.]
For example, I queried ChatGPT about what role it could play in unified communications, or UC. It produced a five-point answer. Take point No. 5:
“ChatGPT can provide insights and analytics related to UC usage patterns. This includes the most frequently used features or the average length of video calls. This information can help businesses to optimize their UC strategies and improve their overall communication effectiveness.”
What’s the use of writing a news article about how ChatGPT will influence the channel? Any user can ask ChatGPT itself and likely get what they are looking for.
The short answer is that generative artificial intelligence tools can’t replace the lifetime of experience and knowledge the experts interviewed for this article have. At least not yet.
These experts suggest that generative AI’s path in the IT channel is more than just a technological story. It could reshape how business is done in this arena.
Understanding that is more than a five-point summary.
Unified Communications
NEC’s Marc Hebner
From providing automated customer support to assisting with language translation, generative AI will change the playing field within the channel, according to Marc Hebner. He’s the senior vice president and head of enterprise business in the Americas at NEC. Hebner said when it comes to unified communications, the incorporation of generative AI will make meetings much more efficient and effective. Convening online will become the preferred method of work communication, he said.
For example, Hebner said the technology could recognize conference call participants verbally making plans for future meetings. The AI-backed tool could then “automatically kick [you] out a meeting invite.” Or the tool could digest massive amounts of information and even make value judgements about the key points of a call. These are just some of the ways Hebner said he sees Microsoft applying ChatGPT to the UC space. [Read more about Microsoft’s relationship with ChatGPT.]
Some experts argue UC hasn’t evolved dramatically in recent years. However, AI is already leveraged in unified communications and collaboration platforms. Generative AI promises to improve areas such as meeting summaries and surfacing information in real time. That said, analysts at research firm Omdia, which shares parent company Informa with Channel Futures, said it’s important to understand where ChatGPT won’t be useful. It cannot examine video, provide video sentiment analysis, or even read body language, at least not just yet.
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