Conversational Trends 2019 - Part 1

Bots came a long way from silly little toys to alternative transactional interfaces generating real revenue. No wonder Gartner predicts that within 2 years, more than half of enterprises will be spending more on developing bots than creating mobile apps. Gartner also predicts that most enterprise organizations will adapt a so-called CUX (Conversational AI-first Interfaces). CUX will start to play an equally important role to the one the regular web UX currently plays.

As UX turns to CUX, so will commerce evolve from web to mobile, and then to conversational commerce. As Chris Messina, the inventor of the widely-spread hashtag, puts it, “conversational commerce is about delivering convenience, personalization and decision support while people are on the go, with only partial attention to spare.”

If you plan to implement chatbots or conversation commerce in your organization, or if you’d like to know the trends for this technology, you need to understand that chatbots are as much about the conversational user interface as the intelligence behind it. Some call it AI, but actually it’s often a messy combination of integrating different systems (CRM, billing, product catalogues, payment gateways) together with NLU/NLP algorithms sprinkled on top (Natural Language Understanding/Natural Language Processing).

Let us look at the stages on how this technology will evolve in near future based on example for an energy company:

Level 1 – Notification Assistants (last 10 years)
Level 2 – FAQ Assistants (now)
Level 3 – Contextual Assistants (now – 2 years from now)
Level 4 – Personalized Assistants (2 – 4 years)
Level 5 – Autonomous Organization of Assistants (+10 years)

In this scenario, all of your life’s details from your bank, HR department or even your gym are pulled together and combined with the Energy company system’s data (CRM, Sales, Billing etc.) to present you with contextual, hyper-personalized offer. An example would be like sensing a coming holiday trip based on a calendar date, switching off all electronic devices in your house and adjusting the temperature based on weather predictions.

In this part, I broke down the main ideas behind it and tried to give you an idea on how we might expect those solutions to evolve in the future. Armed with this knowledge, we will look at the most important trends shaping the industry in 2019.


  • Łukasz

     

    Felsztukier

    Digital Innovation Manager