Robots are the future to effective customer service

“Artificial Intelligence can replace humans,” said chatbot startup CEO Gerardo Saladra, “but for creating better-paid jobs for humans.”

Salandra, CEO of Rocketbots in Hong Kong, shared his view on AI implementation in media and advertising industry at the sixth annual Big Data & AI for Media  conference in Hong Kong from 7-8 December.

Salandra started by tackling the common myth of AI held by many people that it is hard to implement in the industry.

“The barrier to implementation is that we have too high expectations towards AI,” he said. AI can significantly increase the efficiency in workplace, thus saving money.

For example, when you invest in a chatbot for the customer services, he explained it can answer the simple questions so less staff is required for the office and the wage cost can be cut down.

Another example would be using AI to personalize public relations and marketing content for the customers to increase their subscription rate.

Salandra explained the current AI system is running with generative models, which is able to learn things and identify similar phrase with different wordings.

He gave the example of the two lines “Why is my flight delayed” and “Why we did not aboard on time”, saying the new generative models are able to give the same answer for the two questions while the old “if, then” retrieval-based is not able to.

Also, the latest technology can also identify the emotion in text, the urgency of the question, type of inquiry and suggest an answer that will then be approved by human customer service.

He concluded by saying even though AI can only do specific tasks now, every enterprise should start to build their neural network and upscale to catch up with the AI trends.