Quarterly Newsletter: Experience Next – AI’s Role in CX

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS AN AI STRATEGY

While Generative AI continues to become increasingly powerful and more useful with every new update and release, right now at G2O, we see the most practical uses for AI falling into one of three categories: optimizing costs, accelerating human innovation, and informing decisions.

But more uses – and more powerful uses – are coming, and we’re here to help our clients navigate these advancements and determine the best ways for AI to improve their Employee Experience, Customer Experience, and Citizen Experience.

Dive into this quarter’s Experience Next Newsletter below for helpful insights to getting AI incorporated into your business solutions.

Thank you,

Christopher Barcelona, SVP, Strategy

AI isn’t the Solution, but it can be a Means to Your Solution.

Despite the hype, AI is just a tool, and Generative AI is still evolving. Nearly half of all companies are still just exploring AI.

But here’s the interesting part: Companies that strategically build their AI capabilities are significantly outperforming their competitors in profitability, market share, and customer satisfaction. So, what are you waiting on?

Of course, AI isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, but it can be a powerful tool to help solve your specific business challenge.

[Read Our Complete Point of View]

But if you have time to read a little more…

Experience Next: What is Customer Experience Transformation? … just in case you didn’t read last quarter’s issue of the newsletter.

Stat one. Stat two. Stat three.

AI Can Help with Nearly Everything – Including Growth.

Or maybe that headline should be rewritten to say: Especially Growth.

From writing sales emails and answering customer questions, to forecasting demand and writing code, AI can help with almost any aspect of any company. And when AI is strategically and effectively executed, it enhances engagement, increases efficiency, or both – which are key to any growth strategy.

Enhanced engagement improves customer satisfaction, increases customer life-time value, strengthens customer loyalty, and drives more revenue.

Increased efficiency through automated tasks, reduced human error, and increased speed leads to costs savings.

And all of that ☝️ adds up to growth.

Since we’re an organization filled with tech nerds and innovators, it’s no surprise that we’ve had team members experimenting with AI for years.

But more recently, as we were identifying the best ways to integrate AI into our own processes and solutions, we started with a simple internal survey – asking our team members about their current use and comfort with AI, concerns related to AI, excitement around the potential of AI, trust levels with AI, and ideas on how they’d like to use AI.

Some of the responses were pretty much what we expected. But a few surprised us.

“AI felt less intimidating after talking about our team’s survey results. It’s still a big deal, but knowing my team shares a lot of my interests and concerns made it easier to just try things out together. I think it helped us start figuring out where AI fits into our work.”

AI assistants have been helping us for a while. AI agents are beginning to help even more.

What’s the difference?

An AI assistant does pretty much exactly what you ask it to do. They perform tasks based on your prompts. The tasks might be very simple or quite complex. But an AI assistant will do only the tasks you prompt it to do.

ChatGPT is an AI assistant. It writes what you ask it to write, and it creates images based on your prompts. It does not have agency to make decisions on its own.

An AI agent has much greater autonomy and does what it can to achieve the objective you’ve assigned to it. It can collect and analyze data. It can make decisions based on that data. And it can initiate actions without your input.

Here are three quick examples of AI agents that can help in your business.

Anthropic’s Claude:

While Claude can be used as an AI assistant, it also has the capability to function as an AI agent acting on behalf of the user to complete tasks. To show the autonomous power of Claude, a member of Anthropic’s Developer Relations team recently released this video, explaining what happened when he asked Claude to build a basic website.

Aider:

Aider helps developers by generating code, writing tests, and cleaning up scripts directly within a developer’s coding environment. While Aider is often completing specific tasks as requested, it also has the ability to interact with a developer’s codebase, suggest edits, generate code snippets, and conduct other tasks to achieve the objectives as established by the developer.

Project Mariner:

In December, Google launched Project Mariner. This AI agent can browse spreadsheets, shopping sites, and other online assets to inform actions taken on behalf of the user. To strengthen user trust in this agent, Project Mariner makes its reasoning visible to the user.

If we’re going to produce an entire newsletter dedicated to the role of AI in CX Transformation, we figured we should give the last word to four popular Generative AI tools.

We asked a few questions, and received some pretty consistent answers no one here at G2O could argue with.

Then, mostly just for fun, we tried one more prompt. And the results proved to be both entertaining and informative. So, we decided to share. Enjoy.

The Prompt: In the style of Dr. Seuss, please tell us the most important thing to consider about AI when developing or executing a Customer Experience (CX) strategy.

ChatGPT:

Oh, the things AI can do, it’s quite a delight,

It can help you by day and can work through the night.

But don’t let it lose that warm, human touch,

For customers value that oh-so much!

It’s not just the speed or the smarts that it brings,

It’s how well it listens and softens some things.

So, while AI’s clever and learns on the fly,

Keep hearts in your strategy, and reach for the sky!

Google Gemini:

Oh, be careful, dear friend, with AI so bright,

A tool it can be, a helpful delight.

But if used without care, a mistake it may make,

And a customer’s trust, it could sorely forsake.

So remember, dear friend, as you craft your new plan,

The heart of a customer, the soul of a fan.

Let AI be a helper, a friend, a good guide,

But never forget, humans inside.

Microsoft Copilot:

In the land of AI, where tech ideas sprout,

Remember this tip, there’s no need to shout:

Use AI to enhance, not to replace,

The warmth of the humans, the smile on a face.

For in the CX world, both tech and heart blend,

To craft great adventures from start to the end.

So, give folks a journey both clever and kind,

With AI and humans working in mind!

While we’re not sure any of these responses will lead to a bestselling children’s book, we are confident they all nailed the key point of…

AI without a human touch,

Will not help you all that very much.

(NOTE: We wrote that last stanza without the help of AI.)

Let’s connect and figure out the next steps in your organization’s AI journey.