The future of AI in the contact center: Webinar highlights

By Kezia Downing
0 min read

Learn about the adoption of AI in customer service and the key predictions for the future.
Recently, Talkdesk hosted a webinar on The future of AI in contact centers that featured Paul Lasserre, global segment lead – applied AI Solutions at AWS, Margi Deinlein, customer insights manager at Talkdesk, and Jay Gupta, director of product marketing at Talkdesk. The panel discussed the present-day challenges holding organizations back on a progressive path to AI maturity and how these limitations can be overcome in an increasingly automated world. They also discussed the evolving perceptions of AI and its maturity in the field of customer experience (CX).
Why are there gaps in AI investment vs. AI maturity?
In this webinar, Margi Deinlein from Talkdesk discussed the results from a recent global survey of over 900 CX professionals. These results indicated that 69% of CX professionals believed in the importance of AI in the contact center, endowing contact centers with a pivotal role in accepting the challenge and adopting AI to create value. However, just 14% said that they were using AI in transformational ways. The results demonstrated a maturity curve of AI adoption, where there is a wide interest and demand for these technologies, but actual AI maturity is lagging in some circumstances.
Paul Lasserre, from AWS, explained that there are thousands of businesses using machine learning, and this technology feeds on pattern recognition, making contact centers one of the most suitable departments for applying this technology due to the abundance of repetitive customer queries that require similar answers. However, the success of adopting, operationalizing, and driving value from this technology depends on how accurate the AI-model is. There is a tendency to focus on the initial implementation of AI, rather than the long-term maintenance and training of the AI models.
Jay Gupta highlighted that this is a critical step between basic AI adoption and transformational AI adoption. In direct response to this, Talkdesk has developed AI Trainer, that enables contact center agents to continuously train AI models to improve accuracy, without requiring the assistance of a data scientist.
