Remember when the year 2020 seemed incredibly far away? Sure enough, if we'd read about this year's new business trends in the late '90s, we might have thought they were pretty futuristic.
A few developments—including the artificially intelligent voice economy, democratized IT and enhanced social video—became reality in the last few years and form the basis of future business trends in 2020 and beyond.
AI-Powered Voice Economy
Proactive voice response systems have long been a part of customer service. A proactive response from a machine prompts a human to ask a question. Then the machine answers and then asks a follow-up question.
For example, a customer might call a drugstore to order a prescription refill. The machine would offer the customer options; the customer could choose one, such as “Do I have a refill available?" and the machine could respond “Yes, there is one refill available. Can I fill the prescription for you?"
Phone-based customer service “robots" were once clunky and fussy, but the technology behind them is rapidly advancing. This progress is mostly due to improvements in natural language processing (NLP), or a machine's ability to process human speech patterns.
Artificially intelligent voice-based assistants like Alexa and Siri are taking off because if you think about it, it's much easier for humans to communicate with digital devices and software by voice than by typing onto a screen. Your assistant sits quietly in the background until you ask for its help, and thanks to NLP, it can respond to you far more accurately than in the past.
For the rest of the innovations, head over to the AMEX Business site.
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