The Age of AI and Businesses

Your Netflix account knows your preferences and soon enough, thanks to the internet, your house will know your preferences. 10 years ago if your car could remember and differentiate the seating adjustments of yours and your partner’s- it was a prestige car. Today, this commonplace task is a precursor to a newsfeed knowing your reading habits, due to your past behaviour and predicting your behaviour from reading to shopping to sleeping.

Every part of every job is now seemingly under threat. Accountants and Bookkeepers feel that automation and learned intelligence can take their jobs. Fruit packers are worried about a robot doing their job, call centre agents worry about auto-diallers and artificial intelligence which can take the human out of the call and provide most of the solutions in a customer experiential setting.

These are real-world examples that are certainly ever-changing and evolving but the profound fact is that as business and consumers see these changes, we need to understand the human touch and need for human connection will be more important than before.

In a consumer era where each customer and each experience can result in a good or bad feedback loop for your business – it is important to create a systematic and predictable model of delivery. This allows the customer experience to be predictable and measurable.

This predictability though does not have a catch-all for the human factor – it doesn’t answer all questions and it doesn’t provide the human touch that we as humans crave. Today in the high-end section of the FMCG marketplace you will see the automated checkout complemented by an equal number of human checkout personnel for this very same reason. People prefer people. Yes, the convenience, yes the predictability. But ultimately it is nice to deal with people. Our job as business owners, services providers and consumers is to identify this requirement and cater to it. To align and to pivot our organisations to provide this solution, along with the convenience and efficiency that we all seem to chase.