If you open the internet and search a little about artificial intelligence, you’ll see that there are some scary things written about the future of it. Some claims say that in the next 10 years, almost a billion people will lose their jobs due to AI involvement.
Others say that by 2050, 99% of the customer service industry will be covered by chatbots and AI-driven software. Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking even warned about an end of the human race because AI robots will take over the world. Aren’t we exaggerating a little bit here?
Yes, it’s a fact that AI has become a highly important part of our lives, and tech lovers are the happiest because of it. Is it ready to take over the world and act on its own? Not quite.
Marketing and call centers are among the jobs that are said to take the hardest hit. That’s a fact, but will no humans be working behind the telephone line? Follow up to see if there’s a chance for something like this!
1. No computer will ever be fully humanoid
No matter what the movies show us, robots will never be capable of doing human functions. In fact, the human brain is so much more potent than the most powerful computer right now, that the comparison looks silly.
Research by the Future of Life Institute says that the human brain is 30 times more powerful than the best IBM computer. But, this is not the end of the story. No robot will ever be able to switch the human’s multitasking abilities, pattern recognition, creative thinking, and idea producing. Yes, it will probably fail in remembering stuff and brain capacity for information or calculating how much is some enormous number multiplied by an even bigger one, but who really needs that in real life?
2. It’s not going to be soon until NLP becomes well developed
NLP is short for Natural Language Processing. It’s a skill that AI computers use to understand what people are saying to them. If you’ve been around when the first attempts of voice recognition showed up, you surely spent hours messing around with Siri asking it to search for things that she misunderstood.
NLP has improved a lot since then, but some engineers think that technology may never fully develop for AI to be on the level of humans.
3. Only chatbots see better performance
When it comes to comparing computers with humans in the customer service industry, it seems that AI only wins in the chatbot section. The artificial intelligence statistics show us that by 2025 the AI chatbot industry will be worth $1.25 billion. Almost all serious companies will surely have a chatbot option for their clients.
This is not supposed to worry anyone. More than 85% of the clients’ chat is happening through AI software. The customer care center – customer communication is still human-dependant.
4. Call Center employees can benefit from AI
Not just that people won’t be sacked from work, but AI might open new jobs in the call center sector. If you’re a marketer that works on the phone all day, you might find the AI support on the computer in front of you highly useful.
Think about how much information and options a proper AI software can provide while you’re talking to a client, and the software listens to your conversation. As you speak, the computer will search through the internet and give you the chance to be super smart while the client on the other side of the line has no idea how you know all this data.
5. Customers prefer humans over robots
A recent study from CGS says that 86% of customers prefer talking to a living person rather than an AI robot. This is not because humans are smarter. Customers like the feeling of talking to someone who’s actually there for them. It’s about the feeling of being taken care of. This is not going to change any time soon. Probably never, actually.
Conclusion
Even though almost everyone on the planet who has internet access also has knowledge of chat apps, they still prefer handling customer service problems over the telephone instead of live chat. A Convoso study says 74% of people prefer telephone over chat.
As we saw from the points above, it’s not going to be anytime soon before computers take over the call center job. Even if the managers decide that AI is worth a try, chances are a lot bigger that employees in this sector will only benefit from it instead of having their workplaces lost.
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