AI is here to stay, now what?

There was once a world where robots helping us with our household chores, errands and other everyday tasks was a world of futuristic daydreaming. That futuristic world is now not only upon us, but about to pass us by – if we don’t learn about it, from it, and embrace it.

Now, to say that AI is taking over the world is a bit extreme, but it is taking over areas of our world to allow us, humans, to become bigger, better, and stronger. That is if we harness the power of AI in our everyday lives and use it to our advantage.

What AI is good for:

Depending on who you ask, AI is good for things like organizing and researching. Organizing pages and pages of data into key data points and summaries. It’s also good for researching solutions to solve business problems.

One of the most effective ways to use AI immediately is in helping with repetitive tasks.

‍While we always say we love our job because no two days are the same, we all know that there are those repetitive tasks that we wish we could hand off to an intern (oh wait, you ARE the intern).  AI has made great strides in handling these mundane, repetitive tasks that are, we admit, crucial to keeping our business alive.

In the contact center space, we are seeing more and more useful ways for AI to help us save time and allow us to spend more time on the important things, like better customer service and upskilling our workforce. In fact, AI implementation can (and will) help us serve the customer better.

‍One way AI can help is by confirming existing information for customers or performing basic scheduling functions. It can also assist with quality assurance tasks related to call audits and scoring, which is a huge win when it comes to improving the customer experience. Now before you start thinking AI can do it all, know that us humans still need to “feed” AI information to help in these areas. So, we are not to point yet that we can completely rely on automation for all customer service functions. But this is definitely an area where AI is growing and will continue to advance.

Every day there is a new advancement in AI announced. We can expect this to not only continue, but to speed up in ways we couldn’t have imagined. There are a few things that AI just cannot do on its own (yet), without us humanoids. Thinking, feeling and making complex decisions are just a few of these things. We will be doing these together, in tandem (hopefully in harmony), for the foreseeable future. We humans will start the thinking process and give AI a little helpful nudge to cross the figurative finish line to complete the task at hand. For those of us in a customer service industry, empathy is a key factor when serving our customers. Right now, AI just can’t do this piece on its own.

For the easier decisions that we “humans” can train AI to do, this is an area to watch for sure. But we’re not quite there to let AI make all our most important business decisions. This is an area however that AI and humans are making great partners and great strides, but it’s not quite the right time to let AI make those BIG decisions, like how you should invest your money. Not yet anyway.

Areas of AI to watch:

In case you didn’t notice, it is the end of 2024. As we get closer to another year, here are a few areas around AI to keep an eye on and learn more about as they are the top trends in AI for 2025:

Generative AI Will Get Stronger

91% of respondents to an IEEE study that came out in September agree that 2025 will see “a generative AI reckoning” regarding what the technology can or should do. Expectations for generative AI, a type of AI that can create new content, such as text, images, music, videos and code, are high, but the success of projects leveraging it remains uncertain. (Source: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/generative-ai-trends-2025/)

Next-Gen Voice Assistants, Legislation and Regulation

According to a recent Forbes article, we will not only see more enhancements made to voice assistants allowing us to hold more “human-like conversations” with them, but we will also hear a lot about a topic that has been continuing to surface - the need for legislation and regulation.

Improvements on Customer Service

If you are in a customer service industry (and most of us are in one way or another), harnessing AI to enhance customer service will be a trend to continue to watch and maybe even embrace next year. “While some specialized inquiries may yet require human intervention, the majority of others really don’t.”  (Source: https://elements.envato.com/learn/ai-trends).

Again, AI is here to stay. There are definitely things that AI is very good at and getting better at every day, while other things it will continue to need human interaction and more training before it’s left to its own devices. What are other things you see and look forward to AI getting better at in 2025?