A2023 McKinsey reportshed light on research wherein one company with 5,000 customer service agents saw its issue resolution improve by 14% an hour, time spent reduce by 9%, and requests to speak to a manager decline by 25%—and it’s all thanks to generative AI.
According to McKinsey, USD $4.4 trillion of value that can be added to existing businesses, by implementing generative AI. The customer operations segment can usher in up to $470 billion in revenue annually. And this does not just consider platforms like ChatGPT. When it comes to customer service, text-based conversational AI is not enough. Customers want engagement, empathy and an option to escalate when a problem is not being understood.
Through its self-service Digital Human development, AI company UNITH (ASX: UNT) is on track to soft launch its self-service platform which will allow any business owner to generate a digital human to work for them, around the clock and conversing with customers all over the world in multiple languages.
Imagine that when people land on your business’s site, they have more than just a chatbot to speak with. There’s a digital human who has been trained on local data and can understand unique customer questions thanks to natural language processing (and is never rude or tired!),the tech behind ChatGPT.
UNITH’s Digital Human platform is already live, but currently operating as a bespoke model to paying clients which include a Big 5 Tech company and a range of smaller businesses with recent contract wins including theAlliance for Public HealthandAZBillions.
The upcoming launch will be for a self-service offering that will enableclients to generate and embed their own digital human on the platform. According to UNITH CEO Idan Schmorak, the digital human will be customisable and educated on the platform which then provides coding that will enable the client to embed them into their own website.
These digital humans mimic the human experience and become reliable customer service representatives, and in the case of AZBillions can be upgraded to offer sales functionality as the online lotteries business has engaged UNITH digital humans for.
What’s more? They are more cost and time-efficient. On an investor call last month, Schmorak highlighted that the opportunity to scale the platform will come by making it accessible to any business owner, even those with minimal tech skills. Where a full time customer service representative might cost $50k per year in wages, an equivalent digital human could be employed from $10k per year, work 24/7, speak multiple languages and never take annual leave.
The scalability of the platform comes in the user’s ability to ‘train’ their digital human, removing the onus from UNITH developers. Through the platform, users will be able to upload documents as source material to be processed by GPT technology. Essentially, the more succinct the material uploaded is (eg, operating manuals, product catalogues, item specifications), the more knowledgeable the digital human will be.
Going forward, a key competitive advantage for businesses is how technically advanced they are, and generative AI has a massive role to play. As per McKinsey, companies that use generative AI have greater automation potential (57%) than those that do not (45%) and this will become even more evident over the next 35 years.
As per their report, “The pace of workforce transformation is likely to accelerate, given increases in the potential for technical automation. Our updated adoption scenarios, including technology development, economic feasibility, and diffusion timelines, lead to estimates that half of today’s work activities could be automated between 2030 and 2060, with a midpoint in 2045, or roughly a decade earlier than in our previous estimates.”
It’s just one of many reasons why businesses will have to turn to services like UNITH’s Digital Human platform to avoid getting left behind.
