Approximately 70 percent of customer service and sales teams don’t fear that AI will steal their jobs.
The finding comes from Dialpad’s latest report: “The state of AI at work in 2023: What customer service/sales employees really think.”
In the study, the prominent enterprise communications tech provider suggests the statistic demonstrates a level of trust and understanding in the design of customer experience AI.
Indeed, providers build AI to augment rather than replace human roles – as per Dialpad, a widespread message perpetuated by many leading CX vendors.
Further supporting this idea, 79 percent of survey participants believe that AI tools will positively influence their work performance – a prospect that excites many.
In addition, 76 percent of service professionals recognize AI’s positive influence on their business’s core metrics, including those CX-focused examples.
Much of this newfound faith in AI stems from the rise of generative AI, with 76 percent of respondents stating they hadn’t utilized AI before but are considering it after using ChatGPT.
That backs up the perspectives of Dan O’Connell, Chief AI & Strategy Officer at Dialpad.
“AI has created an all-new technological frontier that is compressing the pace of innovation at a rate we never thought possible,” he adds.
As AI continues to be embedded throughout enterprise workflows, it’s crucial to focus on new opportunities created by this transformation – the potential that it possesses is a must for every business.
With the rise of generative AI in customer service, many such opportunities are rising to the fore. These include automating post-call processing, auto-generating customer responses, and auto-creating knowledge articles.
Again, these innovations gear towards augmenting the agent role, and early implementations of the technology may support growing positive sentiment around AI.
Newfound Positive Sentiment Swirls Service and Sales AI
Previously, sentiment towards AI had not proved so upbeat, likely driven down by the high proliferation of poor bot-driven experiences.
For instance, in 2019, Forrester found that 54 percent of US online consumers believed conversing with a chatbot negatively impacts their quality of life.
As such, articles stating how AI could take their jobs seemed a little far-fetched for contact center agents – and this is still likely the case.
After all, the Dialpad research shows that only two percent of customer service and sales professionals believe AI will eliminate their role.
Yet, only one in five participants believes it will not impact their role in the next three to five years – showcasing the rising sentiment swirling service and sales AI.
And in the longer term, Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho, believes it’ll start to have a more transformational effect.
Earlier this week, he hit the headlines by hinting that AI will replace roles, not employees.
However, even within that, Vembu suggests the human touch will always prove necessary, even in the autonomous enterprise of the future.
More Eye-Catching Findings from the Dialpad Report
The state of AI at work in the 2023 study spotlights many more fascinating findings into service and sales teams’ perceptions of AI. These include:
- The top three benefits of company-level AI that participants expect are efficiency (43 percent), customer insights (39 percent), and a competitive advantage (30 percent).
- Budget is the primary barrier to AI deployments, with 37 percent of businesses suggesting they didn’t have the financial resources to use AI at work.
- Only 16 percent of businesses have rolled out a company-wide AI policy, hinting at the need for more guidelines on the responsible use of AI.
- Smaller businesses are more skeptical of AI, as 30 percent of companies with fewer than 50 employees are dubious about using it at work.
In conducting this research, the vendor aimed to uncover the adoption rates, most pressing end-user benefits, obstacles, and attitudes toward AI.
The study leverages the survey results of 1,012 US-based customer service and sales reps, with research conducted from May 8-22, 2023, in coordination with Qualtrics.
