Will AI be 2023’s Co-worker of the Year?

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

It’s that time of year when business predictions from analysts, experts, and industry insiders start to make an appearance. Not surprisingly, artificial intelligence (AI) is featuring prevalently in predictions for 2023.

For example, the analysts at Forrester are predicting that AI will become an indispensable and trusted enterprise co-worker next year:

“Rapid progress in areas of fundamental AI research, novel applications of existing models, the adoption of AI governance and ethics frameworks and reporting, and many more developments will make AI an intrinsic part of what makes a successful enterprise.”

This prediction is not shocking or out of left field. A Harvard Business Review article published in 2017 referred to AI, particularly machine learning, as ‘the most important general-purpose technology of our era’. Today a majority of enterprises have already made significant investments in AI and are seeing positive results. These successes are laying the groundwork for further investment and expansion across industries, departments, and use cases.

I particularly like the use of the word ‘co-worker’ in this prediction. Just like any other employee, these AI applications will be a part of the team and require human collaboration to be successful. AI is not poised to take over the enterprise. Instead, it is being used to support the organisation’s goals and help its human colleagues perform their jobs better.

Any AI or machine learning tool can only be successful if it has the right human co-workers. Humans are needed to create the application, train the system, monitor the performance, and perform necessary maintenance. Humans are needed to identify which tasks should be automated with this technology and which are better performed by a real person. Humans are needed to make decisions about when the system should be able to ‘learn’ automatically and when it needs a human-in-the-loop to make that judgement.

In return, the human co-workers benefit from having mundane tasks and processes automated so they can focus on more complex work. Human contact centre agents benefit from easy access to information so they can focus on providing compassionate, emotionally intelligent engagements. Human employees have instant access to IT and HR support online so they can easily get help regardless of when or where they are working.

The advancements in AI over the past several years have contributed to a growing list of practical and beneficial use cases. Enterprises are seeing success with AI-backed customer service, employee training, customer onboarding, personalised sales, advertising, content generation, code writing, product performance tracking – the list goes on. And they are seeing success because of the humans involved with creating, optimising, and using these tools.

Are you making AI an indispensable part of your 2023 plans? Will AI become a trusted co-worker for members of your team in the coming year? As with any prediction, it will be interesting to see how this one plays out within organisations next year.

If you’re looking at adding conversational AI to your 2023 strategy, the team at Creative Virtual can help. Our V-Person™ technology puts you in control of the AI so you can better care for your human employees, contact centre agents, and customers with strategically designed automated support. Request your personalised demo with an expert member of our team to learn more.