What Is Conversational AI and 5 Ways It Is Benefiting Businesses?

Conversational AI is a technology that makes machines participate in conversations with humans that almost sound natural or say human-to-human. The most common example of conversational AI is chatbots and virtual assistants that you find on nearly every enterprise website.

Natural language processing (NLP) and Machine learning (ML) are the two technologies that power up this form of artificial intelligence. 

According to reports, the worldwide conversational AI market, including smart virtual assistants and chatbots, is anticipated to reach about 14 billion USD by 2025 at a CAGR of 22% during 2020-2025. Conversational AI is emerging as one of the fastest adopted technologies in the world, mainly in the form of chatbots and virtual assistants. 

In this post, we are going to discuss conversational AI in detail and will discuss some ways it benefits businesses.

What is Conversational AI?

Conversational AI is a technology that enables chatbots and virtual assistants to converse with humans in a human-like way. The traditional chatbots had a minimal range of answering human questions, including FAQs and other predefined questions. 

In contrast to conventional chatbots, smart chatbots powered by conversational AI can understand human questions and carry out research to provide relevant answers to almost all the questions, mimicking human-to-human interactions.

NLP and ML are the two key technologies that, along with traditional chatbot technology, power up virtual assistants and smart chatbots to initiate conversations and provide answers in the form of texts, videos, and audio.

NLP is the key technology that enables AI chatbots and assistants to analyze and understand human speech. And ML is the technology that helps them correctly answer and respond to human interactions.

Machine learning makes these AI solutions continuously learn and gather information, allowing them to interact and answer almost every human query effortlessly.

Reports suggest that chatbots are the most common use of AI in businesses, and it is anticipated that their adoption rates will likely double in the next two to five years. Now, let's move further and check out the top 5 ways conversational AI benefits businesses. 

5 Key Benefits of Conversational AI for Businesses

Improves customer experience

The key reason conversational AI is taking over chatbots is their efficiency in providing a better customer experience by improving customer engagement. Customers tend to carry loads of queries, especially when interacting with your business for the first time. These queries often go unanswered due to less efficient customer service centers. 

Conversational AI-powered chatbots solve these problems effortlessly by answering almost every customer query in less time. Machine learning technology makes these AI-powered chatbots learn new things continuously, which in turn improves the efficiency and correctness with which they perform human interactions. 

Hence, businesses should employ conversational AI to improve customer engagement and customer experience. Customers get their complaints and queries solved in significantly less time without having to wait for customer service executives to respond. This improves the chances that the lead will turn into a customer and an existing customer will become a trusted partner. 

Will help build easily controllable IoT devices

These days the craze of buying IoT-powered devices has reached its zenith, which has, in turn, toughened the competition in the market to create the most people-friendly devices. Integrating conversational AI with these devices is a safe bet businesses can make to develop easy-to-control devices. 

Integrating conversational AI in IoT devices makes it easier for customers to give commands and for machines to understand and respond to them. The best example of this technology is the Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa you use to command your smart devices. 

Whenever you command, "Alexa play this song," "Alexa order the best quality mangoes," "google find my phone," etc., and get the response from your smart devices, conversational AI is at work. This technology improves the device accessibility, making it easier for customers to control them, thereby improving the service quality.

Enhances service accessibility

Another appealing benefit of conversational AI for businesses is that it improves service accessibility. Conversational AI through chatbots and virtual assistants makes it easier for customers to navigate and find the services they seek. This technology benefits virtually challenged and dyslexic customers as it can easily explain everything they want to know and navigate the right way to render the enterprise's services. 

This way, conversational AI makes your enterprise all-people friendly and hence improves the accessibility of your services over a wider population range which in turn leads you to better profits.  

Will improve inventory accessibility

Conversational AI, as we said, is powered by machine learning technology that enhances its knowledge by continuously learning. We can use this feature of conversational AI to improve inventory visibility and accessibility. This technology will continually keep learning the inventory status and will help managers find things as well as learn their availability easily without going through the hassle of searching complex inventory logs. 

Inventory managers can effortlessly initiate the conversation with this technology to locate specific items and know anything related to the inventory. This dramatically improves the accessibility of inventory or warehouses as even people with absolutely no knowledge of computers will be able to find the inventory status in less time without much hassle. 

Saves costs and improves ROI

Enterprises can save a considerable amount by investing in conversational AI solutions. Employing conversational AI for solutions such as chatbots and smart virtual assistants can be a bit expensive in rare cases, but the ROI (return on investment) is guaranteed. 

Enterprises can save costs and time by reducing the need to employ extra executives to answer customer queries. And it can improve ROI for enterprises by providing satisfactory and prompt answers to every customer query, which will enhance customer satisfaction and customer retention rate, thus leading to higher sales. 

Wrapping up

Conversational AI has emerged as a beneficial tool for enterprises thanks to its incredible benefits. Its implementation in IoT-powered devices has made them easier to control for people of all types, whether they are virtually challenged, deaf or normal. Through its various applications, this technology has helped businesses greatly improve the customer experience and service quality. 

Chatbots and virtual assistants are just some of the two primary applications of this incredible technology. More work is underway, and I believe there is more that this technology can do, which we will witness in the coming years.