Artificial intelligence (AI) is at an important moment where it’s starting to feel more human.
Large language models (LLMs) have allowed AI to become more general and multi-purpose, with generative AI unlocking rich conversational language capabilities and the capacity to generate and modify images, text, computer code, audio and more. The explosive growth of generative AI is inspiring consumers, as applications like ChatGPT and Midjourney have placed its potential directly into the public’s hands to explore in their everyday lives. As generative AI improves AI’s ease of use, a crisis of confidence is unfolding because of perceived threats to employee’s jobs and concerned businesses worried about misusing its complex capabilities.
Now is the time for organisations to discover how to safely use generative AI, and other forms of this powerful technology, to revolutionise their workplace and transform roles. When employees team up with generative AI, a new door is opened for superhuman performance, resulting in more personalised, responsive customer interactions, higher productivity, and improved engagement.
In the contact centre market, businesses are already using generative AI to support employees and enhance bots boosting their ability to orchestrate stronger customer experiences. With its advanced natural language processing capabilities, generative AI can help organisations better detect topic, sentiment and tone from customer conversations. This allows employees to easily extract insights for more seamless self or assisted service experiences.
Generative AI also offers the ability to quickly sort and prioritise knowledge content, enabling bots or agents to surface the most relevant responses for customer inquiries. Applications are also available to help employees rapidly generate draft content and summarise conversations, saving them valuable time in creating customer follow-ups, sales communications and more.
How To Use Generative AI Safely and Ethically
Despite generative AI’s vast potential to transform the workplace, business should put proper safeguards in place to account for its limits. For example, generative AI cannot innately determine what someone wants and needs. Instead, it provides answers or resources that sound credible based on its existing knowledge, data and inputs.
As business leaders leverage generative AI capabilities, the focus must be on ensuring content generated by LLMs is accurate, relevant and appropriate, or they risk losing customer trust and loyalty.
Here are three key truths businesses should consider when developing a generative AI strategy:
1. Create transparency
Customers want personalisation that doesn’t intrude on their privacy. One of generative AI’s biggest risks is the lack of transparency in its decision-making process. The way LLMs arrive at decisions is often seen as a “black box,” resulting in consumer distrust about how data is gathered and stored.
It’s essential for businesses to have a clear understanding of the inputs and data used to train the model. This includes data sets that are not in the public domain and any relevant information that resides across a company’s systems. Additionally, it’s vital to provide AI model explainability to understand how and why the model arrived at its decision. This transparency allows businesses to remain in control and ensures the model makes decisions aligned with their desired outcomes.
2. Use AI as a tool to assist, not replace, humans
While generative AI has demonstrated its great potential to help people save time and improve efficiency, it’s important to remember it’s not a replacement for human decision-making. As employers look to incorporate more automation within the workforce, human feedback is a crucial element needed to train AI.
With humans supervising AI, businesses can ensure the quality and accuracy of the customer and employee experience and produce resources that are properly aligned with business values and goals. Human oversight is essential to protect content accuracy generated by the model and guarantee it meets brand voice, legal and compliance requirements.
3. Establish a set of AI ethical guidelines
As with any form of AI, ethical considerations, such as bias, abuse and privacy, should be scrutinised before using generative AI.
Businesses must establish clear ethical guidelines around the use of AI and align their practices with these guidelines. This includes training models on unbiased data and making sure privacy design principles are incorporated into the development process. Additionally, businesses should actively work to reduce bias in their models and maintain transparency around how it is making decisions.
AI and the future of work
Business applications of generative AI are here to stay and just getting started. In the workplace of the future, employees will not only be assisted by AI but will also assist AI as it becomes a more independent form of self-service. With so many new and exciting ways to leverage generative AI, businesses must make these decisions thoughtfully and carefully. Leaders shouldn’t rush into adopting generative AI simply because it’s hyped publicly. Instead, they should deliberately consider each step on their AI journey to ensure their business is delivering a safe, ethical, and empathetic customer experience.
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