GenAI + Agentic AI: Driving Smarter Self-Service

GenAI dramatically enhances the conversational and transactional efficiency of self-service solutions. By harnessing large language models (LLMs) with curated, targeted, and well-maintained datasets, genAI excels in tasks such as identifying and building intents, crafting intelligent responses, and testing conversational flows. By integrating genAI into self-service applications, organizations can greatly increase the number of intents they can address and interactions they can resolve, significantly reducing the need for live-agent intervention.

When escalation to a human agent is required, these systems intelligently determine the need based on various factors, including detected intents, urgency, customer sentiment, and profile. They also ensure smooth handoffs by providing agents with detailed context with interaction history and conversation transcripts. When combined with machine learning, CAI platforms have the ability to track how human agents resolve escalated issues, uncover patterns, and apply these insights to enhance future automation, continuously improving containment rates.

Addressing genAI’s potential risks, such as inaccurate or biased responses (hallucinations or biases), remains a priority for vendors and users in general. Techniques like retrieval augmented generation (RAG) are becoming increasingly integral to creating tailored and reliable content for genAI-powered solutions. This approach, along with other guardrails, is critical to ensuring the integrity and efficacy of CAI systems. The next phase will be for genAI to be more deeply integrated into platforms and solutions and combined with agentic AI to drive the automation of tasks that historically required live agent handling. This innovation is poised to benefit service organizations by not only improving the CX but also enhancing the EX and boosting productivity. These developments are just the beginning of genAI’s transformative contributions to contact centers and customer service organizations.

Agentic AI, another groundbreaking technology, represents the next frontier in CX automation. Within CAI platforms, agentic AI can broaden and enhance the scope of interactions that can be fully automated. Its “near-human” cognitive abilities allow agentic AI to think and act autonomously, probabilistically, and proactively, making it particularly suited for handling a growing number of tasks in inbound and outbound service, sales, and collections organizations.

Unlike traditional self-service systems that rely on predefined rules or detailed instructions, agentic AI leverages LLMs to identify patterns and autonomously drive actions. It can set its own goals, determine optimal actions, and execute tasks with minimal human oversight, significantly enhancing CAI solutions’ automation and success rates. Its capacity for continuous learning and self-improvement further amplifies its value, ensuring ongoing performance enhancements.

The rapid advancements in genAI and agentic AI are revolutionizing the self-service market, enhancing quality and expanding the range of capabilities and uses these solutions offer. While delivering an omnichannel conversational self-service experience is a major milestone for most enterprises, these technologies are taking innovation to unprecedented heights and giving companies options not previously considered possible. The new AI capabilities enable systems to think independently, source accurate answers, execute appropriate actions, personalize the CX, determine when to involve a human, and continuously learn from every interaction.

As good as CAI solutions already are, they will continue to improve as AI technologies advance and as the expertise, knowledge, and best practices to build them become more readily available. However, these solutions are unlikely to fully replace live agents, as there are many things they still cannot do and other activities they shouldn’t. There remain many situations where customers prefer to speak to a human and others where it’s necessary. While CAI self-service systems are exciting and beneficial for companies and the market in general, it’s essential to strike the right balance between automation and human interaction. Businesses should look for opportunities to integrate CAI into their CX (service, sales and collections) strategies and operations, but they should also continue to make human agents available to handle complex, sensitive, or emotionally charged situations.

Donna Fluss, founder and president of DMG Consulting LLC, provides a unique and unparalleled understanding of the people, processes, and technology that drive the strategic direction of the dynamic and rapidly transforming contact center and back-office markets. As the foremost analyst and visionary dedicated to the contact center and back-office markets, Fuss has provided expert guidance for more than 30 years to technology leaders as well as disruptive newcomers, investors, and enterprises that want to build next-generation AI-enabled contact centers  She can be reached at Donna.Fluss@dmgconsult.com.

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