06 November 2023
Michael Tomkins, chief technology officer, IR
Whether you view AI as a boon to business, or a threat, AI has infiltrated almost everything we do in the business world today. AI is the future, not just a technology fad, and organizations are beginning to understand that if they don’t accept it – they will fall behind.
Understanding AI in UC&C
Until now, communication has relied on email, SMS, social media, and other online services that provide us with information, messages, and ads. As we move further into the digital age, these methods are becoming more one-dimensional and less effective.
The key uses for AI in UC are to increase productivity and simplify processes. AI can relieve the burden of certain trivial tasks and allow teams to concentrate on more important responsibilities.
AI has already made its mark on communication with voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. With language processing capabilities, data contextualization, and the ability to offer deep insights into customer experience, AI is helping to rapidly improve communication.
2024: 25% growth expectations
With growth expectations of 25% by 2024, chatbots and virtual assistants are fast augmenting human involvement in customer service. They can provide instant responses to inquiries, and even navigate language barriers through translation services.
With its ability to analyze speech patterns, AI can help with customer satisfaction by detecting various emotions in a person’s voice. It can also be invaluable in real-time translation for those with language communication difficulties.
Speech-to-text technology has evolved considerably over the years, as AI can process speech in real time, making it a powerful tool that increases productivity, for example, alleviating the need to take notes at meetings. Additionally, once speech is converted to text, it becomes searchable and shareable, adding another layer of business value.
AI can utilize facial recognition and biometrics for authentication for starting a meeting, accessing files, or entering meeting spaces. These methods increase efficiency and save time throughout the collaboration process by doing away with physical ID cards, passwords, or two-factor authentication.
Contextual AI
Context is an important foundational element of machine learning (ML). It’s the key to making your AI rival that of a human. The incredibly intuitive nature of contextual AI enables systems to interpret information in the same way a human would. It enables AI systems such as chatbots and virtual assistants to have an actual human-like interpretation of language, audio, video, and images.
Contextual AI can analyze historical, situational, and cultural elements of data, and use that context to determine the most suitable outcome for the end user.
AI and the IoT
IoT can connect objects to the internet via embedded devices, meaning that seamless communication is possible between people, processes, and things. It can capture a massive amount of data from multiple sources. However, all this data from countless numbers of IoT devices, makes it complex to collect, process, and analyze.
Combining AI and IoT is redefining the way industries, organizations and even economies, function. This amalgamation creates intelligent machines that simulate smart behaviour, offer creativity, and unlock responses, with little or no human interference. While IoT deals with devices interacting using the internet, AI makes the devices learn from their data and experience, providing the perfect symbiosis of technology.
The future of AI and UC&C
There are some concerns and challenges with the use of AI in unified communications. Accuracy can be issue, as predictive machine learning models can give imperfect results. Job security, the constant improvements in conversational AI and the automation of tasks can be viewed as having a potential negative impact on the jobs of customer service professionals. Additionally, security could be at risk as the combination of AI and UC creates a greater area of compromise when using video, voice, text, and file sharing solutions.
However, with ever evolving and improving algorithms, the predictive capabilities of AI will be used in new and innovative ways to boost operational efficiency within the workplace. For example, being able to predict operational delays and pre-empt downtime, AI will have the ability to liaise with users to find the best solutions.
Organizations understand customer experience is of paramount importance, and as such, are constantly seeking ways to improve how to use AI and machine learning to interact with consumers. Combining unified communications and AI means the development of smarter chatbots, improvements in personalization for customers, and therefore an increase in customer retention for businesses.
AI is continuing to evolve day by day, and its power to change the way we work, communicate, and collaborate is increasing. The benefits, besides greater efficiency in the workplace, are that AI can free up employees to be more creative and productive by removing the drudgery of routine tasks. It can help alleviate the stress of bad customer interactions. And it can simplify the mammoth task of collating, analyzing, and processing complex data to help organizations achieve their business objectives.
