The Hottest Trends in Conversational AI for 2023

The Trends Driving the Future of Conversational AI 

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The Hottest Trends in CX Conversational Analytics for 2022
Speech AnalyticsText AnalyticsInsights

Published: May 11, 2023

Rebekah Carter

Conversational AI has become one of the most valuable tools for business leaders to emerge in the last few years. Offering businesses more effective ways to analyze conversations, deliver support to customers, and even empower agents, conversational AI is unlocking endless opportunities for today’s brands.  

What’s more, evolutions in generative AI technologies, large language models, NLU, NLP, and machine learning ensure the technology is growing more valuable all the time. It’s little surprise that at present, the conversational AI market is growing at a CAGR of 22.6%, set to reach a value of more than $32.5 billion by 2030.  

As the marketplace continues to evolve, a number of exciting trends have emerged over the last year, highlighting amazing opportunities for the future of the conversational AI space. Here are some of the hottest trends worth watching in 2023 and beyond.  

  1. Conversational AI Becomes More Accessible 

Perhaps one of the most significant trends driving the rapid growth of conversational AI, is the rising accessibility of the technology. In the past, creating conversational bots, smart assistants, and similar tools would have required extensive coding and technical knowledge. Now, the growing demand for these tools has prompted countless vendors to start implementing them directly into their platforms.  

Generative AI and conversational AI solutions are becoming increasingly common within CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) platforms, data analytics tools, and even CRM and sales tools. What’s more, many platform vendors make it easy for companies to customize these solutions, implementing their own language models and data.  

As low-code and no-code toolkits continue to emerge in the AI space, it’s even becoming far easier for teams to create their own conversational AI solutions from scratch, adhering to the specific needs of their industries. Open-source large language models are giving developers and global enterprises more opportunities than ever before to build their own AI systems.  

  1. Generative AI and LLMs Transform the Market

ChatGPT and similar generative AI models have taken the world of customer experience by storm in the last year. Large language models and generative AI tools are rapidly becoming a crucial part of the conversational AI toolkit, allowing companies to develop bots capable of providing a more intuitive, human-like experience to customers.  

Some CCaaS vendors have already begun implementing their own generative AI capabilities into bot solutions designed for digital self-service. Additionally, companies like Microsoft are embedding these solutions into tools designed to empower the workforce too.  

With the potential to improve customer experiences rapidly through context-driven and personalized conversations, generative AI solutions are likely to have a significant impact on the future of the customer service landscape. The ability to dynamically ingest content and deploy useful responses for customers will not only boost customer satisfaction rates, but help businesses to mitigate rising call volumes and customer service costs too.  

  1. Voice AI Solutions Continue to Mature

Though many major players in the communications and customer service space are currently focusing on the benefits of conversational tools and generative AI capabilities for text-based customer service, there’s growing potential in the voice landscape too. This is crucial at a time when consumers still want to reach out to companies using voice tools.  

Built into the voice landscape, conversational AI solutions can help to streamline the customer experience, ensuring customers are intelligently routed to agents based on their specific needs, and sentiment. The same tools can also collect useful information about the customer journey, provide insights into customer intent, and even provide direct assistance using natural language processing.  

AI-driven IVR solutions could offer business leaders an excellent way to triage voice calls more effectively, and reduce the number of times customers need to repeat themselves, or be transferred to different members of staff.  

  1. Conversational AI and the Employee Experience

While many leaders in the conversational AI space focus on the benefits these tools can offer in terms of enhanced customer experiences, it’s worth noting that the right technology can benefit internal workforces too. For IT and customer service departments, conversational AI tools can reduce request volumes with self-service, giving agents more time to focus on high-value tasks.  

For HR departments, conversational AI solutions could automate simple tasks like onboarding and employee verification, helping teams to focus on more meaningful activities. Additionally, bots built with conversational AI technology can be utilized to deliver rapid assistance and guidance to remote, in-house, and hybrid teams.  

Virtual assistants with conversational AI abilities can respond to employee queries and requests the same way they would interact with a customer. They can help agents to track down information faster, resolve problems quickly, and come up with creative solutions to problems. For instance, Microsoft’s conversational AI tools are currently being used to boost employee engagement and productivity through platforms like Microsoft Teams and Viva.  

  1. Improved Emotional Intelligence

As conversational AI technology develops, with advances in machine learning, natural language processing, and natural language understanding, companies are unlocking new opportunities to further enhance the bots and self-service tools they create. Today’s solutions are becoming increasingly effective at detecting intent and sentiment in customer voices.  

This ensures bots can leverage a certain level of emotional intelligence when dealing with customers, improving the quality of each experience. Although truly emotionally intelligent AI is still in its infancy, companies are already working on tools that can more effectively respond to customers in the right tone of voice, using machine learning tactics.  

AI bots and virtual assistants can utilize modern algorithms to analyze customer interactions and emotional datasets, so they can respond more effectively to customers based on their current state of mind. This could lead to more empathetic bots in the future.  

  1. The Rise of Proactive Customer Support

Finally, conversational tools can also provide companies with a fantastic way to generate more proactive strategies for customer service. Not only are these tools excellent at collecting information that can be used to learn more about the customer journey and the potential issues customers might face during interactions with customers, but they can offer fantastic automation options too.  

Gartner suggests that by 2025, proactive customer service and engagement strategies will significantly outweigh reactive processes. Conversational AI tools could help with this transition. Bots can be created to monitor a customer’s activity on an app or website and offer recommendations or assistance before a customer asks for help.  

Additionally, bots can effectively analyze customer data consistently to identify trends and patterns, giving businesses the tools they need to understand their customers, and deliver a better quality of fast-paced, relevant service.  

 

 

Artificial IntelligenceChatbotsChatGPTConversational AIGenerative AI
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