Friday, October 26, 2018

AI and the Trough of Disillusionment

Artificial Intelligence adoption is playing a major role in the implementation of digital transformation by businesses. The hype is strong and expectations are running high.

Recent Gartner surveys show that a major part of AI implementation is likely to be in the area of customer interaction. It's not going to happen in the next year or so. Five to ten years is being put forward as the most likely timeline. Can the hype survive such a wait? Not likely.

AI still needs to go through the Trough of Disillusionment as identified in Gartner's Hype cycle. With so much emphasis on customer interaction, that trough could be deep. Past and current attempts to have customers interact with computers have been rife with frustration on the part of the customers. Even the established and simple process of calling a company and being met with an array of choices in the form of selecting numbers still does anything but encourage customer interaction.

Of course, the new AI systems will be a lot better than that and will be conversation based. But they had better be very good. Anything less will bring us back to our experience with the more primitive systems of the past. And the trough of disillusionment could then be a canyon. For more on Gartner's take, check this out.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi! I could have sworn I've been to this site before but after browsing through some
of the post I realized it's new to me. Anyways, I'm definitely happy I found it and I'll be bookmarking and checking back often!