> Talk to the Machine:
The Rise of Conversational AI By Ryan Merheby
The contact centre industry is facing one of the largest transformations any job market has seen.
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I is providing business opportunities to some and threatening the prosperity of others. As the lines between human and AI begin to blur, so do the lines between their respective value in contact centres.
The industry has faced many transformations since its conception in the 1970s. In the early 2010s, there were almost a million people working at contact centres in the UK alone. America and Europe had the largest market shares in the industry, but soon corporations saw more value in “offshoring” such jobs to India and Philippines, abandoning their operations and employees in the west to cut costs of labour. This shift in the market has led to Philippines having the largest global contact centre market share at 26 percent (in 2014) boosting their economy. Since then, many contact centres have migrated to east Asia. While globalisation has reshaped the industry, conversational AI appears to be en route to completely change the dynamics of the workplace at an unprecedented level. As labour costs rise in the Philippines and India, firms will look at the choice of automation over humans. AI has the potential to reshape entire industries, providing increased efficiency while creating and obsoleting jobs along the way. WHAT IS CONVERSATIONAL AI? Conversational AI incorporates natural language and speech processing to interpret the intent, context, and meaning of what a user is saying, while forming a relevant response to the user through text or simulated speech. It can assist a customer as effectively as a human agent. HOW DOES CONVERSATIONAL AI WORK? When a user on a platform sends a message or says a sentence, the user input is sent from the application layer (the interface and databases of the platform). The input reaches the back-end of the platform, the back-end sends the input — along with the context — to the AI layer. This layer consists of NLP (Natural Language Processing) algorithms that take in the user input and context, which is then used to interpret the meaning of the user’s input into machine code. The interpretation is then sent to the Natural 134
"AI has the potential to reshape entire industries, providing increased efficiency while creating and obsoleting jobs along the way." Language Generating algorithm, which pulls relevant data from the source’s database and uses that data to formulate a response that meets the user’s needs. The sentences are put together using sentence-forming algorithms, and sent to the user. A REPLACEMENT OF HUMAN LABOUR? The mass application of conversational AI is not an adoption that is decades into the future, conversational AI is already widespread. Microsoft, Amazon and Google have all recently released pre-trained conversational AI models designed for contact centre work. Conversational AI has also become more accessible and cheaper, as many open-source libraries, pretrained models, and datasets for NLP have been released in recent years, such as: SQuAD (Stanford Question Answering Dataset), spaCy, and DeepPavlov. Modern models have advantages over human agents: • Conversational AI can provide services to customers 24/7, all year • It is more capable of multitasking and could operate more calls than an agent • It is more effective at processing and analysing data than humans • It can use previously learned data, stored in a database, to personalise the experience • Conversational AI allows users to serve themselves • It can recall and provide more relevant information There are also limitations: • Conversational AI is not always familiar with social queues or dialect • It may be too slow to ensure an immersive and dynamic conversation, and unable to keep up human speech rates CFI.co | Capital Finance International
Engineers have begun to implement conversational analysis that effectively interprets intent, social queues, and most words in a variety of languages. They use datasets that contain a knowledge tree of all the words, meanings, and connections. Over the past decade AI has become more efficient and easier to train, as computing power and the number of available tools increases. Nvidia, a GPU manufacturer, recently trained the BERT Large Accurate Language model in under an hour. It was faster at interpreting language than the average human. Nvidia did use over a thousand graphics cards to achieve this, but it marks a massive advancement. IMPACT OF CONVERSATIONAL AI The advancement of conversational AI will make people’s lives more convenient, allowing quick and effective support. However, with every disruption comes externalities. Eight percent of the Philippines’ GDP is produced by contact centres. The industry has been said to have raised living standards, and conversational AI threatens that progress. The technology is mainly used to automate repetitive tasks, but it is beginning to surpass human capability, as well as reducing costs. In 2015, Blue Prism, a company that offers automated solutions, reported saving an average of 30 percent of all costs thanks to conversational AI. Juniper research predicts that there will be eight billion voice assistants by 2023 and that voice commerce will expand to $80bn per year. In the future, the main role of humans may be to decipher the speech of the occasional customer that AI can’t understand. But inevitably, millions of workers globally will be laid-off. In fact, it is already happening. Up to 25 percent of contact centre operations will have been produced by AI this year. On the other hand, as the conversational AI market grows, there will be a larger demand for software and machine learning engineers in the US and Europe, thus creating jobs. But the jobs created may not be in equilibrium with the number of jobs obsoleted. As with most developments of automation, corporations require less and less labour over time. The voice commerce industry is projected to flourish in the coming years and businesses that