AI-powered chatbots to improve user experience with innovation

“If your competitors are using AI and you are not, you will be out of business.”

– Jack Hidary

Intelligent Automation is a holistic solution for digital transformation using Business Process Management (BPM), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) with various applications like virtual assistants, Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning (DL) to make automated decisions. Automation can thereby help in employee empowerment and offer employees tools that can in turn lead to improved quality of the delivered goods.

Conversational UI is an AI-powered program that uses NLP to converse with users like a human. Better known as chatbots, conversational UI is experiencing a huge demand and customer focus, given the multiple benefits it can offer. Capgemini Research Institute’s Conversational Interfaces report indicates a positive trend of conversational assistants going mainstream with at least 74% consumers using them for various business functions.

The following are ways in which chatbots can help your business:

• Respond like humans while not pretending to be one
• Simplify and automate business and IT processes
• Machine-learning capabilities to learn new options based on new user interactions
• Make customer interactions more interactive, personalized and client persona-driven, including photos, symbols to make responses explanatory
• Have a personality – self-service assistants can have a persona/ avatar consistent with the corporate branding

Conversational UI on the manufacturing plant floor

IT systems on the plant floor are usually complex with large amounts of data that are not easily accessible in real-time and most plant floor personnel may not know the nuances of the IT systems – navigating complex systems is often not easy for them. For example, plant floor supervisors often need to look up all machinery and outbound products with multiple configurations and specific parts in order to quickly detect a defective component or a missing part, make fixes and put them back on the assembly line. We have built a custom solution for one such customer.

Our AI Chatbot use case for an automotive plant

• Plant floor user asks the chatbot to retrieve cars with specific parts
• User query is mapped to a dynamic query to fetch data in real-time
• Multi-lingual support
• Voice-enabled
• Understands the context of conversation and links with follow-up questions
• Assistant enables to quickly identify cars to be removed from the assembly process (based on workflow) for additional quality checks

Users can invoke our chatbot using text or speech to fetch real-time data and take remedial actions to ensure the highest quality in manufacturing. Such an innovative solution for a mundane task!

Using speech to talk to a chatbot allows you to continue working as you speak. Speech is particularly useful as plant floor employees often want a hands-free solution that can be integrated into handheld or personal communication devices using Bluetooth earpieces, while they continue working with machines and tools on the plant floor.

Snapshot of Conversational UI for automotive manufacturers

Chatbot as a Service

AI chatbots can be adapted to cater to other domains such as retail, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and finance where multiple benefits can be realized. This is a fantastic opportunity for many of our clients – Conversational UI is indeed the new UI! The Conversational UI we built for this specific use case can be adapted to other sectors and use cases and invoked by other consumers as a service.

Chatbot for business continuity and social initiatives

In the current COVID-19 pandemic, many technologies are in focus with helping people during the outbreak. Voice chatbots can play a big role here (and are already being used in multiple countries) to provide information to people on pandemic status, quarantine checks and health checks. Also, chatbots can be used for business continuity plans and reduce the workload on call centers by automating some of the mundane and repeated tasks. Chatbots can provide multilingual support to cater to a wide range of customers.

Conclusion

Capgemini Research Institute’s AI automotive report indicates that adoption of AI for scale has increased by 40% in the last 3 years but is still relatively low across the industry. Similar trends are also indicated in Capgemini Research Institute’s Conversational Interface Conversational Interfaces report, with many sectors like consumer products, retail and finance showing positive trends of consumers increasingly preferring to use voice assistants across the customer journey. There are several high benefit use cases that the businesses and enterprises can gain from – what’s needed is committed investment, effective governance and a clearly defined strategy. There are far reaching business benefits in including AI features in applications and it is essential that organizations plan for a clearly defined AI strategy.

Need us to design a custom chatbot solution for your business needs, please reach out to me at sripriya.venkatesan@capgemini.com