Chat-GPT, Bard, Alexa and the Customer Experience

Hello again,

At long last I have decided to pen a few words on this blog. Today I wanted to add a few words to the dialog surrounding Chat-GPT, Bard, Alexa and this new age of technology (Artificial Intelligence).

Not many people will know but my first foray into software development many moons ago, was to build an artificial like chat-bot, because I had grown up watching the likes of KITT from original Knight Rider reruns, J.A.R.V.I.S from Iron Man and transformers. So my young inquisitive mind I wanted to build my own virtual friend to assist me in my day to day. Long story short I never did get to build my KITT equivalent but it did teach me a lot about processing input and generating responses, which in a way is the foundation of technology systems: input-> process -> output.

However, what my young brain couldn't have conceived was the large amount of data needed for these kind of systems to work. This wasn't mentioned in the credits scene for the original Iron Man. But the AI systems now are far more advanced than what I was attempting to do. Alas, I digress.

However the key question I wanted to explore in this post was the impact on the customer experience. Over the last 10 years, there has been a lot of emphasis on a 'personalised customer experience', everything from adverts on websites to the suggested shows on streaming sites has been heavily developed to be specific to your unique taste. In many ways this has been a great achievement within technology, it has curated list of content specific to my taste, it shows me adverts of things I might actually be interested, it has build an entire ecosystem of content/layout grids all with one aim to make the customer experience easier.

So to loop back to my pre-amble about Artificial Intelligence, As of 2023 we are still on the verge of exploring the use-cases for this technology. Many have already added their own Chat-GPT wrappers and intergrated a slimmed down version of the GPT model into their own software ecosystem (https://help.snapchat.com/hc/en-gb/articles/13266788358932-What-is-My-AI-on-Snapchat-and-how-do-I-use-it-)

While this gives new opportunities it feels a bit like guesswork and shoe-horned into an application. I think the key challenges for Product teams and Software Development teams is to look at how the principles of AI can be used to leverage business value. For example using automation to spin up A/B tests in a shorter period of time. Leveraging AI to summarise large volumes of competitor analysis into short actionable insights. There is a lot of opportunities from the internal/external customer experience that can be solved with AI outside of Chat-GPT wrapper.

So to conclude my two cents, is Artificial Intelligence is going to transform the Customer Experience. However we should expand the scope beyond the trendy newsworthy brands and look to build additional tools using the principles of the Artificial Intelligence Framework to unlock business value.