{"id":1515,"date":"2021-10-04T23:37:43","date_gmt":"2021-10-04T23:37:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.replicant.ai\/ai-adoption-skyrocketed-2021\/"},"modified":"2023-01-31T18:28:40","modified_gmt":"2023-01-31T18:28:40","slug":"ai-adoption-skyrocketed-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.replicant.com\/blog\/ai-adoption-skyrocketed-2021\/","title":{"rendered":"Why AI Adoption Skyrocketed in 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"
Last week, Harvard Business Review reported that <\/span>AI Adoption Skyrocketed Over the Last 18 Months<\/span><\/a>, fueled by business\u2019 need to overcome staffing challenges and changing customer expectations brought on by the pandemic.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cFifty-two percent of companies accelerated their AI adoption plans because of the Covid crisis,\u201d said the report, citing a study by PwC. \u201cJust about all, 86%, say that AI is becoming a \u2018mainstream technology\u2019 at their company in 2021.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n This is especially true for contact centers. Business leaders who accelerated digital transformation out of necessity in 2021 have been pleasantly surprised by AI\u2019s ability to resolve customer service requests and eliminate hold times. <\/span><\/p>\n Technologies like conversational AI specifically have matured exponentially since 2019, and are now apt enough to not only cover pandemic-related business gaps, but add ROI well beyond 2021.<\/span><\/p>\n Here\u2019s how AI is shaping contact centers of the future:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/b>Compensating for the skills shortages caused by Covid-19 has presented many new challenges of its own. Contact centers, for example, found that training new agents remotely or increasing their investments in business process outsourcing (BPOs) was <\/span>time-consuming and expensive<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In cases where contact centers needed a contingency plan, conversational AI could deploy in weeks and handle fluctuating call volumes at a fraction of the cost, without impacting the customer experience. <\/span><\/p>\n Moreover, conversational AI\u2019s ability to resolve the majority of common customer issues is a ringing example of how AI can increase agent retention by offloading repetitive tasks and freeing agents to leverage their creative and empathetic skills to resolve more complex customer issues. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cAI is already beginning to help fill skills shortages of the existing workforce through career transition support tools,\u201d said Rob Jekielek in the report, managing director with Harris Poll. \u201cAI is also helping employees do their existing and evolving jobs better and faster using digital assistants and in-house AI-driven training programs.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n When AI solutions are paired with outcome-driven workflows, business efficiency goes up in unforeseen ways. Conversational AI, for example, doesn\u2019t just resolve tier-1 customer calls, it can intelligently route urgent call types to human agents. <\/span><\/p>\n At the same time, conversational AI can automatically summarize call notes and log them in call centers\u2019 CRMs. It can also support revenue-generating use-cases like automated outbound calls to follow up with customers or remind them of impending renewal dates without requiring time on behalf of agents. <\/span><\/p>\n All of these are additional benefits to resolving tier-1 customer service issues that contact centers can\u2019t achieve without the help of automation. <\/span><\/p>\nStaffing Solutions<\/h2>\n
Productivity Boosts<\/h2>\n