Exploring the emergence of Chatbots in knowledge management at KMWorld Connect 2020
Chatbots are the new frontline for customer service in today's enterprise—they enable companies to connect with their customers on a personal basis, reduce the impact on human agents, and decrease bottom-line expenses.
Jeremy Bentley, CEO, Smartlogic, discussed “Semantic AI to Drive Chatbot UX” during his KMWorld Connect 2020 session.
According to Gartner, by 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with a conversational platform. As a result, organizations need an innovative semantic AI strategy to ensure an effective solution for their employees, customers, and key partners.
Bentley shared how the use of semantic AI and models provide the context and meaning that drives exceptional chatbot experiences.
He examined virtual assistant trends, customer experience with chatbots, how semantic models improve the relevance of chatbot interactions, how to use a semantic model to power a chatbot experience, and the challenges ahead.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is restructuring the ways businesses communicate both internally and with customers. AI is crucial to enable automatic learning and the flexible interpretation of automated business communications.
Chatbots are predicted to move from simple user-based queries to advanced real-time conversations, he explained.
Current chatbot stats include:
- At the end of 2018 there were over 300,000 chatbots on Facebook (Venture Beat)
- The top industries profiting from chatbots are real estate, travel, education, healthcare, and finance (Chatbots Life)
- 80% of businesses are expected to have some sort of chatbot automation by 2020 (Outgrow,)
- Over 50% of customers expect a business to be open 24/7 (Oracle,)
- Chatbots can save up to 30% in customer support costs (invesp,)
- The chatbot market value was at $703 million in 2016 (Outgrow,) - Global Market Insights state the overall market will grow to $1.3b by 2024
- 68% of consumers note that messaging is the most convenient way to stay connected with businesses (Adweek).
The first trend where chatbots are growing is customer experience. Chatbots are best for customers who expect an instant response, he said. They can easily scale during peak times to engage customers and deliver better customer experience.
The next trend is chatbots and robotic process automation, he said. Chatbots deliver business value by streamlining the internal workflows inside enterprises to improve experience and efficiency of the user.
Robotic process automation is a technology that allows employees to configure computer software or a “robot” to capture and interpret existing applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, trigging responses, and communicating with other digital systems.
There can be HR chatbot assistants, chatbots for employee onboarding, or chatbots that help IT service desk agents.
Challenges exist with using chatbots and virtual assistants, though, he explained. Chatbots can misinterpret requests because they are not able to understand the customer's intent. They can also misunderstand nuances of human dialogue and execute inaccurate commands.
These issues can be solved by using knowledge models and semantic AI, Bentley said.
A knowledge model enumerates important concepts, identifies the context of concepts and relationships between concepts, and reflects different ways of expressing concepts.
The purpose of them is to provide understanding of, and context to, unstructured content. It is also the enabling ingredient for AI.