Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is getting to a point in the hype cycle where we are slowly starting to see the practical applications of it spring forth. No longer resided to the realms of Science Fiction, or a pipe dream of business technologists, A.I. has found itself slowly entering organisations as a complement to many departments. The most prominent of these is sales.

A.I. can impact sales success through a mixture of automation and deep analytics. We haven’t quite got there yet, but it looks like we have now laid the foundation for the “soft” rise of A.I.

I’d like to touch on my personal view of the rise of A.I. At an industry conference recently, a colleague of mine commented that it seems like the rise of A.I. is not quite what science fiction lead us to believe. We don’t seem to be seeing an aggressive rise like the Terminator or the Matrix, rather a gentle introduction, akin to rising dough in an oven. It’s such a difficult thing to implement in organisations that it would be hard to see any form of A.I. being harmful to an organisation (in terms of taking away jobs etc). I just thought I’d touch on this in case anybody had any concerns about “the robots taking over”.

The most practical application of A.I. in the sales process is that of a customer service representative being complemented by a chatbot. But it isn’t easy to implement.

I was recently discussing with a friend of mine who worked at Telstra. Telstra was in the process of implementing an A.I. chatbot “Codi”. When we discussed how long the A.I. Chatbot would take to process a given request: “about 9 minutes on a good day”. Now, I don’t know about you, but 9 minutes is an awfully long time for anybody to do anything. Telstra was facing great difficulty in ironing out the creases of Codi. Things were getting so bad now that they were trying to find a way to get from Codi to a customer service representative as quickly as possible.

Though Telstra was having a tough time, others are having small wins.

Flamingo A.I. is having small wins in the A.I. space with its customer service bots Maggie and Rosie. Though not on the same scale as Telstra’s Codi, Flamingo seems to be having small wins in the chatbot space. At an industry meetup recently, Flamingo presented their take on where they saw A.I. going. Put simply, they could summarise the future in two words: “zero touch”.

The concept of “zero touch” has been about for many years. It is only in the last year or so that it has become a practical reality. Put simply, having zero touch means making sales without any contact from another person. Though it is very difficult to do right now, the idea is that if customer service and support can be automated, the resulting cost efficiencies could spark an industry-wide revolution.