To borrow a phrase, November 30, 2022, is a day that will live in infamy—the date Open AI publicly announced availability of its generative AI ChatGPT beta. In just five days, ChatGPT had amassed over one million users. As of this writing, the number of users has surpassed 180 million. Business and consumer awareness of the potential power of generative AI has grown quickly and company leaders are asking their operational leaders to understand and evaluate potential use cases in their departments.

At the same time, the race has been on for contact center and customer experience solution providers to incorporate the new technology into their solutions. They have spent the time since the ChatGPT beta announcement expanding existing AI applications and building new ones. As early as summer 2023, market leaders were bringing generative AI-enhanced conversation summarization, intelligent virtual assistant, and agent assistance solutions to market.

What do customer experience leaders need to know about generative AI in 2024? In the sections below, I discuss three of the burning questions.

1. Can companies using legacy on-premises contact center solutions take advantage of generative AI advancements?

Put another way, is using Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) a prerequisite for incorporation of AI into a company’s customer experience (CX) operation? The simple answer is no. Companies using premises solutions can integrate some types of artificial intelligence into their operations. One common use case is replacing traditional IVR with a chat or voice bot. During the pandemic, many businesses and government organizations used this strategy to handle the sometimes millions of unexpected calls they were receiving.

The more nuanced answer to the question posed is yes, with a few buts. One but is that it is much easier to give customers using a chat bot the ability to switch to a live agent when the company is using a CCaaS solution. With CCaaS, it is as simple as writing an instruction in a design tool and implementing an available API (application programming interface). With a premises solution, a professional services engagement will be required—increasing both the amount of time required and the total cost.

2. If my company is not interested in automating interactions, does that mean generative AI solutions are not relevant in my customer care operation?

Some companies don’t want customers answered by bots. They have a corporate value of having calls answered by a live person. There are still valuable use cases for deploying generative AI in these businesses, to support live agents.

One of the most common early Gen AI use cases in the contact center is auto-summarization. At the end of an interaction—either a live phone call or chat—the agent is presented with an auto-generated summary of the call. The agent then reviews the summary for accuracy, makes any required changes, and saves. Instead of taking two or three minutes to write notes about the interaction, the review can take just a few seconds.

Agent assist is another Gen AI application that is designed to help the agents perform their tasks more efficiently. As a customer talks to the agent and makes their request, the agent assist application can proactively find the information the customer is looking for or guide the agent with the questions necessary to help bring the interaction to a successful close.

3. Should I wait until Gen AI becomes more mature before I implement it?

There is an oft-used phrase in financial markets that, “you can’t time the market.” It would be great if we could all buy low and sell high, but even the most successful Wall Street arbitrageurs make mistakes and lose big from time to time.

I believe the same is true when trying to time deploy innovations into your business. Yes, technology will continue to change, but waiting for change to stop is like trying to time the market—an impossible task.

My advice to companies is to start small, with a proof of concept or trial, and evaluate the outcome of Gen AI in your business. You will likely find that adding a chat or voice bot can increase your interaction automation rate dramatically, e.g., from five percent with an IVR to 20-plus percent with a well-designed bot. Adding agent assist has been known to increase first contact resolution dramatically, by giving agents the information they need to help a customer instead of transferring them to another agent.

Especially for companies that have already moved their contact center to the cloud, the time, cost, and risk to trial innovative Gen AI features is low. It’s time to get in the game!

(Editor's Note: This post was written for 8x8 by Sheila McGee-Smith, President and Principal Analyst, McGee-Smith Analytics.)

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