AI Articles and Analysis about Customer service

Artificial intelligence in retail is being applied in new ways across the entire product and service cycle—from assembly to post-sale customer service interactions, but retail players need answers to important questions:

Episode Summary: In some ways, investors in AI have to do a lot of what we do at Emerj, which is sort through marketing fluff and determine what's actually working and what's more of a pipe dream, as well as what's coming up in the next five years that seems inevitable and what's more likely to flop. In this episode we're joined by Li Jiang, a venture capitalist with GSV Capital whom I was connected with through BootstrapLabs. This week, Jiang speaks about the current areas of AI that he sees driving business process automations, as well as what technologies he believes will make a long-term impact in terms of automation. His insights on where AI automations are generating cost savings and increased efficiency, as well as what roles might be completely replaced or significantly augmented by AI, are useful nuggets for companies who are thinking through some of their own business processes and are eager to identify low-hanging fruit.

When businesses make investments in new technologies, they usually do so with the intention of  creating value for customers and stakeholders and making smart long-term investments. This is not always an easy thing to do when implementing cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Business intelligence case studies that show how these technologies have been leveraged with results are still scarce, and many companies wonder where to apply machine learning first (a question at the core of one of Emerj's most recent expert consensuses.)
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have certainly increased in capability over the past few years. Predictive analytics can help glean meaningful business insights using both sensor-based and structured data, as well as unstructured data, like unlabeled text and video, for mining customer sentiment. In the last few years, a shift toward "cognitive cloud" analytics has also increased data access, allowing for advances in real-time learning and reduced company costs. This recent shift has made an array of advanced analytics and AI-powered business intelligence services more accessible to mid-sized and small companies.
In this article, we provide five case studies that illustrate how AI and machine learning technologies are being used across industries to help drive more intelligent business decisions. While not meant to be exhaustive, the examples offer a taste for how real companies are reaping real benefits from technologies like advanced analytics and intelligent image recognition.

The following article has been written by Luigi Congedo, principal at BootstrapLabs. BootstrapLabs is an AI-focused VC firm in San Francisco. Editing and quotes added by the Emerj team.For information about our contributed material and publishing arrangements with brands, please visit our partnerships page.

Executives worry about their businesses.

They often have to navigate, with limited resources, a stormy market made of customers, competitors, and regulators, and the interactions between all these actors make finding answers to business questions a complex process.

In July of 2016, we sent out a series of survey questions to past guests who have been featured on the Emerj podcast, including academic researchers, founders, and executives who are experts in the machine learning domain. In this article, we focus on responses to the following question:

Episode Summary: I remember reading an article in Scientific American years ago about a poster of a person looking in the direction people sitting in a school dining room, and that this poster would make people sitting in the dining room less likely to litter. This seems like an absurd example of holding people accountable for their actions, but as it turns out, there are a lot more serious consequences to ensuring behavior change through observation, and one area where this matters is medicine.
Today, there’s a major issue with people who don't adhere to their medical regimens, only to relapse or experience more serious symptoms later on. This week's guest, Cory Kidd, CEO of Catalia Health and known for his work at MIT on human-robotic interaction, is working to help solve this problem by developing a robot that adds some of that physical presence and accountability. This is likely one of many novel medical AI applications that we're likely to see roll out in healthcare over the next decade.

Since Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Kik, Slack, and a growing number of bot-creation platforms came online, developers have been churning out chatbots across industries, with Facebook's most recent bot count at over 33,000. At a CRM technologies conference in 2011, Gartner predicted that 85 percent of customer engagement would be fielded without human intervention. Though a seeming natural fit for retail and purchasing-related decisions, it doesn't appear that chatbot technology will play favorites in the coming few years, with uses cases being promoted in finance, human resources, and even legal services.