Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming our modern world, changing the way we lead our lives and run our businesses. To be effective, AI’s most useful applications require massive amounts of data. But as our CEO Antony Brydon observes, many of today’s customer service organizations simply don’t have the scale of data needed to effectively automate customer support solutions. That’s where experts enter the loop. 

Antony recently appeared on an episode of Adrian Swinscoe’s RARE Business Podcast, a series that brings the noted author and customer experience (CX) expert together with leading entrepreneurs to discuss the latest ideas, strategies, and insights. Antony and Adrian had an in-depth conversation touching on asynchronous messaging, conversational interfaces, and how subject matter experts can dramatically improve support automation outcomes. 

According to Antony, the AI-powered customer support solutions of today are unlikely to achieve full automation — that will be something for future generations of technology. “What a lot of people don’t realize,” he notes, “is that most of the machine learning models will trail off very quickly if not being constantly and systematically retrained.” Current AI technology requires human experts to train it, create content for it, and help improve performance over time.

Injecting networks of subject matter experts into a support automation system brings a variety of benefits in terms of performance and quality assurance. For example, we humans have a real knack for phrasing the same question in hundreds of different ways (fun fact: 15-20% of Google queries made by users on a daily basis have never been seen before) and experts can help automation systems recognize and properly manage this diversity of inquiries. Experts can also rate the answers provided by peers in their network, leading to higher quality responses and resolution rates.

That’s just a taste of Antony and Adrian’s conversation. Be sure to read about the episode here to learn more.