Talla Company Blog

If the marketing hype is to be believed, artificial intelligence will soon be able to completely replace your entire customer support team, yet somehow no AI solution is out there causing massive support headcount reductions at any major business or agency. As it turns out, current-generation AI is really good at exactly three things, and none of them is replacing an actual human support representative.

Jana Eggers is the CEO at Nara Logics, and a mathematician by training. Her unique perspective has her urging all CEOs to learn more about AI,

“I really encourage CEOs to get to understand AI. They can understand it to a level enough that it will be beneficial to their business. It's not something that I think they should just say, “Oh, that's my tech and that's my smart guys.” It's everyone. Don't put it off in a corner."

One of the contributing factors to social media addiction is FOMO, or fear of missing out. It's an unhealthy condition wherein smartphone users constantly check their notifications for fear they are being left out of rewarding social situations. It is a terrible reason to use -- or not use -- your smartphone or social media.

Unfortunately, a similar mal-adaptation is driving the artificial intelligence strategy at many businesses. They have FOMAI, fear of missing artificial intelligence.

AI is absolutely NOT magic. At least, that’s what Katherine Gorman has to say about it on AI at Work. Katherine hosts Talking Machines, a popular AI podcast that serves as your window into the world of machine learning through conversations with experts in the field, and discussions of industry news. Check out her insightful advice to business leaders getting started with AI. Katherine addresses how much AI seems like "magic" saying, 

Customer support is one of the most challenging, time-consuming, and costly aspects of any business, but artificial intelligence software can help make your customer support team more efficient. Below are five steps in your tech support workflow that AI can speed up, simplify, or streamline.

Your sales, customer success, and support teams are at the front line of your business. They interact with prospects and customers on a daily basis, and those interactions can determine whether a customer purchases (and keeps purchasing) your product or service. Their main tool for driving revenue and decreasing churn is information. And how quickly they can access accurate information has a direct impact on your bottom line. Unfortunately, often times a company’s existing knowledge base is making their teams job harder.

Savvy Customer Success teams can spot customer churn before it happens, provided they have access to all the systems where the early signs of customer dissatisfaction may hide. Modern A.I. tools can scale up this hard-won skill so even the most novice Customer Success teams can prevent churn and keep clients happy.

Artificial intelligence is making headlines by helping companies like Google, Facebook, and Tesla sell better products, but A.I. can also help any company -- including yours -- sell products better. And it starts by empowering your sales enablement team.

We've argued before that generalized artificial intelligence is generally unprofitable (and maybe impossible), but there are some real-world examples of just how hard it can be for A.I. to get competent at even very narrow tasks. For example, you'd have no trouble asking your friend for a restaurant recommendation, but it's really difficult to teach A.I. to perform the same task well.

Everyone from Elon Musk to the late Stephen Hawking to an entire research institute are warning about the dangers of an A.I. apocalypse, where some real-life version of SkyNet or HAL 9000 will rise up to wipe out pesky human life. This is probably alarmist, not just because general artificial intelligence like we see in the movies may be impossible, but because -- for the foreseeable future -- there's no money in it.