This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration of The European Sting with the World Economic Forum.

Author: Umesh Sachdev, Managing Director, Uniphore

• Artificial intelligence (AI) can enrich the customer experience and improve conversations with customers, both of which are essential to the success of a business.
• The next phase for businesses is to create a multi-layered AI architecture that integrates industry knowledge with cutting-edge technologies.
• A strong AI architecture that integrates all functions of a business will be a strategic differentiator that can help innovate and reshape entire industries.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in modern businesses now involves much more than collecting data to better program computers for various tasks. It changes the rules of the game, making AI a crucial part of helping businesses grow and innovate.

Integrating a holistic AI architecture is crucial to taking businesses to the next level. Having a robust AI architecture will continue to fuel massive digital transformation within companies and industries, especially when combined with other advanced technologies such as natural language processing (NLP ), automation, machine learning (ML) and more.

Organizations across industries know that customer experience is the foundation of business success and is essential to staying ahead of the competition. By optimizing conversations between people and automated systems, AI has increased – not replaced – human capabilities to improve the way businesses interact with their customers. To unleash the true value of AI to enrich the customer experience and improve conversations, we need to think about how this technology can be integrated into existing business systems to build an AI architecture of the future.

Digitization of operations for the future

Businesses have changed rapidly over the past year and a half, as the COVID-19 pandemic has universally pushed the way we operate and communicate virtually by helping people stay connected while being separate. This has led to increased adoption of digital strategies, including the use of AI and automation, across a range of applications with the goal of ensuring business continuity, delivering better results and improving results. ” organize high quality contactless experiences.

The next phase for businesses is to create a multi-layered AI architecture that integrates industry knowledge with cutting-edge technologies such as NLP, robotic process automation (RPA), ML, and advanced analytics. When deployed on a cloud-based infrastructure, it can positively impact multiple business functions including sales and marketing, customer service, operations, finance, human resources, and more. With the fundamentals of conversational automation and AI in place, what’s the next step? How can we further develop AI and increase its potential to further improve our engagement and interactions with people and machines?

Understanding emotions and interpreting video data is the next step towards smarter AI. The real future of AI will be to integrate speech and facial expressions to understand the full context of human conversations. When this happens, businesses will see an overall reduction in operational costs, increased revenue, and improved efficiency through the use of AI across the enterprise.

The science behind technology and emotion

International Data Corporation (IDC) Futurescapes Predicts That By 2022 At Least 65% Of Forbes Global 2000 Companies Will Use NLP, ML, and Deep Learning. These models will enable use cases such as automating tasks and answering questions from customer services, human resources, purchasing, etc. This powerful combination of AI and video has huge potential to drive new waves of transformation by delivering automated, intelligent and valuable conversations with customers that will drive better business results.

Businesses will be able to analyze and better understand people’s facial expressions, emotions, and engagement levels in meetings and when customers interact with brands using video technology. The information extracted from this data will help companies make more informed decisions to improve their business operations. More importantly, it will help improve, more human-like communications through digital channels, all thanks to AI.

For example, a speaker at a virtual conference presenting to an audience of over a hundred people will never really know if every member of the audience is engaged. However, companies using video AI can detect and help interpret facial expressions and eye movements to help determine how well the audience is listening. All of this information can then be fed back to allow the speaker to learn and improve their presentation and public speaking skills, both at the moment and after the event. The information can even be taken further to gauge how the public feels about adopting a particular product or service.

Unlimited transformation potential

In today’s digital world, being able to “sense and act” on all elements of conversations – including visual, emotional and engagement cues – becomes extremely important. For companies looking for a competitive advantage, having a solid AI architecture that integrates all of a company’s functions will be a strategic differentiator that can help innovate and reshape entire industries. AI will continue to play a central role in the future of customer experience as businesses increasingly rely on smart technologies to support and improve the quality of their interactions with customers.

While this is still a work in progress, we are staying away from AI as an all-think, all-know, context-changer technology. IDC predicts that only 20% of AI will be closer to General Artificial Intelligence (AGI) by 2026. At this point, AI will be capable of real reasoning, will have human-like logical leaps, and will link several pieces of information from different sources to arrive at a complete answer – but that is still in five years.

As we look into the future, the AI ​​architecture of the future will drive new waves of digital transformation by providing automated and intelligent conversation and collaboration resources. This will improve communication between all divisions of a business, which will lead to better and more consistent results.