Juan Jose Lopez Murphy, Head of Artificial Intelligence Data Science, Globant, says chatbots can change the way we connect with brands – but it’s a matter of all organizations understanding this purpose to move in the direction of progress.
Since the launch of the first iPhone in mid-2007, the world has witnessed an extreme change in the relationship between people and smartphones. This is because, by incorporating the virtual assistant Siri, Apple’s system popularized the connection with chatbots once and for all.
In 2023, ChatGPT went a step further through the Artificial Intelligence (AI) language model, making it possible to multiply the reach of responses. Now, Whatsapp has also incorporated Meta AI – making the cell phone respond to even more user requests quickly and dynamically.
In this digital context, our routine can count on some of these functions. For example, we can ask a virtual assistant such as Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant for the temperature or our daily tasks, all while having a coffee.
These and other examples could continue as the day progresses, but what is truly important is related to what is behind the hypothetical case: we incorporate an ally into our daily tasks to solve small – or some more significant – moments of friction.
When we talk about chatbots, there are opinions about how new and exotic it is to interact with a machine, which was the big impact of ChatGPT, but there is also a group that views the technology with skepticism. And a third, much less developed approach is the ability of chatbots to impact the global economy, mainly due to the exponential increase in the efficiency of different organizational processes.
The chatbot market, which was worth $4.7 billion in 2022 and with a compound annual growth of 23%, is expected to reach $15.5 billion in 2028, according to market intelligence platform Markets and Marketers.
The use of chatbots for customer service is no longer an innovation, but it is becoming a necessity. We are so used to using them from the moment we wake up, that it will be increasingly uncomfortable to buy a pizza through the delivery app or request a medical appointment through a phone call, for example. Today there are companies that offer these services in a much more simplified and agile way with chatbots.
This means that if organizations don’t upgrade the customer experience in the coming years, they will remain as if they were paper maps in the age of apps. In this current context, it is common not to identify profound changes that are happening in the world, however, the need to incorporate new technologies will be what will define between a company that achieves sustainable growth and another that does not.
And for this progress to materialize, there is no need for overly complex developments, since the implementation of the technology must answer a single question: what are the user requirements that I must solve? The case of Skyscanner, a website that aggregates airline tickets from several airlines, is a good example.
At its core, the portal is designed to make it easier to find airfare. In addition to this function, in some countries, they have implemented features that filter trip information through the chatbot via Facebook Messenger, which responds to the customer in a synthetic and more complete way.
Amazon has also been innovative and has simplified commerce. This is because the multinational is exploring the chatbot market with the Rufus virtual assistant, which elevates the shopping experience to the user due to the system that compares, in a more systemic way, the main aspects of the products to make suggestions, in addition to making customer service more efficient, answering questions about shipments and returns.
In the globalized world we are in, chatbots can solve most of our problems, changing the way we connect with brands once and for all. Now, it will be a matter of all organizations understanding this purpose to move in the direction of progress.
