AI customer service bots are making their way to a store near you
You won’t be able to tell if it’s a real human or an AI chatbot
Coffee diehards and hyper-personal shopping
If conversational commerce still feels under the radar, one reason is that most growth has been inChina, Japan and South Korea. All the same, it is cropping up everywhere. If you are talking to your girlfriend or boyfriend on Facebook and suddenly want to send them flowers, you don’t even have to break the conversation. You click on1-800-Flowers.com, a conversational AI tool integrated with Messenger, and explain what you want. You don’t even need to enter card details if you use Apple, Samsung or Google Pay.
Or maybe like me you are a die-hard coffee lover. I used to stand in a queue to get my morning latte, but not now. I just order from my couch from the chatbot on theMy Starbucks Baristaapp, and my coffee is waiting when I reach my local store.
The AI underpinning these advances encompass aredeep learning, sophisticatednatural language-processing,voice recognition, andcognitive computing– which is a system for machine-thinking that emulates human thought. But the big selling point – besides ease, comfort and shopping anywhere at any time – is probably the potential to make a customer’s retail experience much more personal.
If it lives up to expectations, customers might soon be able to interact with an AI who understands what they want in specific detail. We already see big retailers offering personalised products to attract customers – for exampleNikeandAdidasallowing people to design their own trainers.
But by using sophisticated AI, personalisation can move to a whole new level. Customers will receive personalised recommendations in their own language, easing the burden of choice and making the experience as enjoyable as possible. They might spend more money as a result – not because they are being manipulated, but because they almost feel like they are buying from a friend.
Meanwhile, businesses will gain new insights into people’s shopping behaviour. Yes this raises privacy questions, but it will also help businesses to refine their offering. This should reduce returns and increase sales.
Where it’s heading
Conversational commerce reminds me of the2013 movie Her, set in a near future where Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with Samantha (Scarlet Johannson), an AI-based virtual assistant. The relationship eventually becomes unworkable when it emerges that Samantha is simultaneously having intimate friendships with thousands of men. She then combines with other AIs to perform an upgrade that leads to them withdrawing from human interaction.
We may be some way from falling in love with chatbots, but clearly there are questions about ethics here. The technology must not harm humans or pose any threat to their dignity. For instance,Microsoft recentlyrestricted its voice mimicry technology because it makes it easier to createdeep-fake videos.
Another issue is jobs. Automation is clearly a threat to the workforce, and conversational commerce could well be part of that. But unfortunately, businesses will not pay for so many support staff if AI can do the job at least as well. One consolation is that AI in its entirety might create more jobs than it destroys. For instance, the World Economic Forum predicted in 2018 that the net new jobs created by AI would be58 million by 2022.
Looking further ahead, conversational commerce could become all the more prevalent in the Metaverse, the virtual reality representation of the internet, with voice-enabled shopping potentiallyaccounting for 30%of all e-commerce revenues by 2030. It seems foreseeable that we will be interacting with AI avatars in virtual reality stores, or talking to bots in real-life supermarket aisles via augmented reality glasses.
What may seem alien to our generation is likely to be second nature to the shoppers of tomorrow. There are pros and cons to this technology, but I suspect my little chat with the KLM chatbot at Schipol airport will soon seem quaint compared to what comes next.
Article byShweta Singh, Assistant Professor, Information Systems and Management,University of Warwick
This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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