The introduction and adoption of Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPA) such as Google Assistant, Apple Siri, and Amazon Alexa have, to some degree, changed a customer`s journey.
It's been over 7 years since the advent of the first IPA, so it would be the right time to ask this follow-up question: Will this trend catch up with the Enterprise world soon? Is it time for smart personal assistants to move from home to business?
For an answer, one needs to look into how consumers have been using IPAs so far, their performance, the rate of adoption, and the development and use of technologies underpinning digital voice assistants.
In a matter of a mere decade, the role of customer relations – managing interactions between clients and companies – has gone from making phone calls to being omnichannel. Now add one more touchpoint to these: the personal digital assistant.
The “intelligence” in the IPA comes from the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as Speech Analytics (speech recognition and processing), Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning.
The virtual personal assistant app landscape is still evolving. However, tech biggies such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Samsung have already released not only their own versions of IPAs but also several apps, services, and devices aimed at tapping into this emerging market.
At last count, Amazon had added 45,000 skills developed by 3rd parties to the Echo Alexa. But what stands out in surveys of these personal assistants is that, after the initial hype, their adoption rate has slowed. Voice assistants are being touted as the “next tech disruptor”… and everyone’s waiting for that to happen.
This, however, has not deterred other companies from launching newer assistants. Everyone wants to improve consumer interaction by introducing voice-guided interaction mechanisms, new interfaces, and so on.
The resultant data from all this is like a virtual gold mine for a company, to be used to make sense of a consumer`s journey. Various forms of analytics, such as intent analytics, will also let these tech companies understand their customers even better.
But the adoption rate is something that those working on these IPAs agree needs to be bolstered.
The use of such conversational systems in an Enterprise represents a huge opportunity to make data analytics accessible across business users.
Despite the slowdown in the adoption of virtual assistants, some studies show that at least some workplaces have not lagged in early adoption.
A recent survey by Spiceworks of 500 IT professionals in the US and Europe found that about 24% of large businesses use Siri, Alexa, and other assistants in some capacity. But, as even the study underlined, firms' use of IPAs did not extend beyond their initial use, voice-to-text dictation.
So, while the study did predict an adoption rate of over 40% by 2019, it`s not just about quantity. Quality, that is, the roles that businesses will assign to such AI-run “business assistants”, too, is important.
Just imagine a key member of your Sales team, rather than going through reports of the past 6 months’ sales trends or peering at a dashboard, simply using his phone or PC to ask his Enterprise IPA for the details? The AI-driven agent not only informs him of the past trends but also forecasts what will happen in the next 6 months.
Such assistance in an Enterprise will not only be powered by technology that understands human language but can also analyze vast amounts of data. It will use algorithms to offer not only intelligent insights but even recommendations on the future course of action in the context of a particular business or operation.
....................to be continued, click here for part 2.
