Digital Assistants: They are Here to Stay

Most folks think of a digital assistant as someone who manages their calendar appointments and completes those nasty travel and expense forms. Well think again. Digital assistants are going to be doing much more than most of us dreamed or thought about. What does this mean for business and when can we expect this to happen?

1. Better Customer Service: 

Digital assistants will be able to understand what your customer wants in context and provide needed answers quickly. In order to do that, there will have to be a very natural conversation that leverages how the digital assistant interprets your customers emotional state, at the moment, to give appropriate answers for the situation. Now this will have to be pretty seamless for customers not to detect that they are working with a digital assistant and accept the outcomes.

2. Picking the Right Process and Complete it:

At first, digital assistant will be able to call up rule based and structured processes and complete them on behalf of the customer following the policies set up by specific industries, value chains and specific organizations. Later digital assistants will be able to add cognitive capabilities to complete fuzzy and emergent processes.

3. Creating Unexpected Value:

Imagine if the customer wants to do several connected processes that span the typical functional specialties that businesses historically have had. Digital assistants could easily handle this complex kind of service without exposing the artificial boundaries with an organization. Digital assistants could also employ machine learning to suggest tweaks to the policies rules and constraints that organizations set up.

When will this be available? 

According to Aragon Research, based in Silicon Valley, it will be sooner rather than later. Aragon predicts" By the year end 2019, Digital Assistants will talk with and complete many electronic tasks for their human counterparts" Also Aragon predicts that "By year end 2020 will leverage Predictive and Cognitive Applications to deliver critical knowledge to employees and customers.

Net; Net:

More sophisticated digital assistants will emerge over the next two to three years as the demands for great customer service at a lower cost hits full stride. These digital assistants and lower level assistants, called chat bots, will become software or robotic agents for the good of many, This is a crucial trend to watch as organizations transform to digital.