AI Articles and Analysis about Customer service

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.

Episode Summary: What does the world look like when we can replicate human expertise in an assistant? Are we close to developing human-level chatbots that we can ask about law or medical conditions? We dive into this topic with Founder and CEO of exClone, Dr. Riza Berkan, whose personal assistant and chat-bot company is leveraging day-to-day human conversational templates in machine learning technology in order to better approach the tough task of replicating human expertise through a machine. Berkan talks about the edge layer of his company's “secret sauce”, and touches on the future applications of what might manifest in this field in 5 to 10 years in medical and other consumer applications.

1 - Carnegie Mellon Receives $10 Million From K&L Gates To Study Ethical Issues Posed By Artificial Intelligence

Episode Summary: As Senior Director and World Wide Head of the Cognitive Innovation Group at Nuance Communications, Mark Hanson works on bringing Nuance lab innovations to business applications, with the guiding goals of  improving customer experience and business efficiency. In this episode, Hanson speaks about natural language processing (NLP) and virtual assistant services, where he believes this technology is headed in the future and where it's driving value now, and how companies are applying NLP in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

Expertise: Data science and economics

Brief Recognition: Elena Grewal leads a team of data scientists responsible for the user’s online and offline travel experience at Airbnb. Her team partners with the product team to understand and optimize all parts of the product, using experimentation and machine learning in a wide variety of contexts. Prior to Airbnb, Elena was a doctoral candidate in the Economics of Education program at the Stanford University School of Education. She received a B.A. in Ethics, Politics, and Economics, with distinction, from Yale University, and a Masters degree in Economics at Stanford University. She was also the recipient of the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship.