Industry proponents have been pushing the idea that artificial intelligence (AI) is set to have a major impact on customer experience (CX) practices. But how do end-user organizations feel about AI’s potential for facilitating CX? After all, they are the ones who will or will not utilize the technology. Some initial results from our ongoing CX management survey offer some insight into organizations’ attitudes toward AI’s potential impact on CX practices.
Referring to Figure 1, we see that just over 20% of surveyed organizations believe that AI will have a dramatic impact on how CX is practiced. In contrast, the majority feel that AI offers some “good possibilities” for influencing how CX is practiced. That said, just under one quarter of respondents are not sure what AI’s benefit to CX will be, and not one of the organizations surveyed felt that AI offers no potential benefits for CX management.
The most important trend to gather from these findings is that most organizations appear to have somewhat guarded expectations for AI when it comes to its potential to influence CX. I often hear the warning when discussing a new technology that it should not be seen as a panacea. (In this day and age, does anyone ever really view any new or emerging technology as a panacea?) In this case, the majority do not seem to view the technology as some kind of panacea.
I put myself in the category of those who believe that AI is going to have a significant impact on how CX is practiced. As I have pointed out in other research on AI’s adoption into the enterprise, organizations have indicated a strong interest in using the technology to assist with various CX initiatives — especially for customer self-service and self-help advisory systems as well as for personalization and cross-channel customer engagement applications.
Organizations also want to use AI for more advanced applications that have the potential to provide a big impact on CX — for example, predictive maintenance. In fact, according to our recent report, “AI & Machine Learning in the Enterprise — Most Viable Use Cases,” organizations indicate that they view customer engagement and CX management as the most viable enterprise use cases for AI.
As a general trend around the use of AI in the enterprise, I believe that optimizing customer engagement and CX management will be dominant domains for applying the technology over the next two to four years.
Finally, I’d like to get your opinion pertaining to what you see as AI’s potential to impact CX practices, as well as comments you have about CX in general. You can comment at the link below, email me at chall@cutter.com, or call me at +1 510 356 7299 with your comments and questions. And, if you have not done so already, please take our CX survey on how organizations are adopting or planning to adopt CX management practices and technologies.
