Over the last 18 months, AI applications have leapt into the mainstream. As of last week, OpenAI GPT-4o offers advanced tools spanning text, image and speech, for free – in a hope to get as many users addicted to the company’s synthetic assistance as possible, before the market settles and it can be monetised at scale. A day later, Google promised an equally impressive set of products.
Between the ability to sustain a provocative conversation, recognise emotion and generate lifelike videos of celebrities – every other month seems to make our collective consciousness go: “Wait.. it can do…what?” In practical terms, however – unless one needs companionship, summaries of long documents or drafts of generic copy – is AI actually useful? Or, closer to the subject – can it be used to enhance a high-net-worth-customer’s brand experience?
In this series, I’ll outline a few scenarios and the framework we apply to look at the omni-channel experience. I’ll skip various operational applications and image generation for now, both because the subjects are too expansive for a post and because it’s questionable whether the warming world needs to spend a ton of energy generating billions of images (mostly) for giggles. Let’s celebrate smaller businesses’ newfound ability to produce great visuals without sacrificing their limited means for costly photoshoots and move on.
Sleek presentations notwithstanding, current AI tools are not autonomous agents one can outsource consequential relationships to. They can be verbose. They regularly lie, with cheerful unapologetic confidence – not out of mischief or arrogance, but because they don’t really understand what they’re talking about, and their programming doesn’t allow “I don’t know”. As a tool, however, AI can do things that have, until recently, been either prohibitively expensive or simply impossible. Training a powerful proprietary model is an affordable and fairly trivial, technical task, making the use of artificial intelligence a choice. So, why would anyone choose to do so?
Area 1: Product support
Goal
Offer an über-efficient 24/7 real-time support channel.
Example
Instead of leaving customers to frantically google how to rescue off-white cashmere from being permanently damaged by spilled red wine, armed with product knowledge and trained by top cleaning experts, a brand bot could assess the tools at the caller’s disposal and instantly offer several options for that exact scenario – in text or by voice.
Unlike human support, AI bots communicate at consistent quality at any hour, accent free and in the customer’s native language, irrespective of their location. They can pick up on the caller’s tone of voice, respond accordingly and supplement instructions with relevant audio or video materials in real time. If necessary, they can involve reliable local specialists, organising professional help even if the client is abroad and would struggle to explain the matter in a local language.
