The next time you call customer service, the human voice you hear may not be actually human. It could be a machine. A computer programmed to cheerfully manage countless everyday customer complaints and service calls 24/7, without fatigue, overtime or complaining.
“Conversation AI is a game changer,” says Jennifer Api, a marketing expert and business strategist who is a 1983 Baldwin High School graduate, who currently lives in the East Bay Area. “You can route inbound calls on a large scale without having to handle outreach tasks such as appointment scheduling or navigate annoying recorded menus.” Last week, in a two-day, 90-minute Maui Hi-Tech Hana presentation at Kīhei's Malcolm Center, APY explained how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing business and life in a way that many of us don't know.
Examples of what is called large-scale language models or conversational AI include Gemini, Chatgpt, Claude (person's attitude), Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity AI, Meta AI, and Grok (Xai). Each one occupies a niche in AI cyberscape. Most often, we offer free service tiers with paid subscriptions with more features, including higher usage restrictions and faster response times.
APY, an area managing partner with Chief Outsider, the largest fractional executive company in marketing and sales, offers marketing expertise to Fortune 500 companies such as Mattel, Adobe and Intuit.
She said that AI is no longer a futuristic concept like “Hal” in the 1968 classic film “2001: Space Odyssey.” Today, artificial intelligence is transforming industry at a breathtaking pace.
The first session at APY focused on general marketing principles, laying the foundation for a next-day talk on AI and how it is restructuring the business. The technology can enhance Maui's diverse economic landscape, from small and medium-sized businesses to a wide range of established sectors such as tourism and agriculture.
Just as “Hal” had a dark and ominous side in a fictional film, AI raises horrifying questions about ethics, morality, bias, and unexpected negative consequences, such as replacing humans.
Addressing these concerns, Apy says AI is at the heart of it, “using technology so that we can do something faster and faster.” She encourages participants not to be threatened by jargon, saying, “Don't throw it away in all these terms. It's like a lot of computers, and it seems like a lot of computer automation.” She says, “As we speak, all the features within the organization employ AI,” showing widespread applicability across a variety of business sizes and sectors. “As humans, we need to understand how we can use AI to make our work better and get ahead of it.”
The second day session featured real-world applications of artificial intelligence beyond definition.
For example, APY detailed how AI is used for “generated AI analysis,” helping companies analyze market segments, data and campaigns to identify the most profitable strategies. She showed me how to upload sales files to a tool like ChatGPT. This acts as a “little junior analyst who will work with me at 2am” and segments customers and calculates potential revenue for the revitalization campaign.
She said that companies are “actively mechanized many workflows, allowing employees to handle more sophisticated tasks that humans need in the loop.”
Beyond analysis, APY explains in detail the role of AI in content creation, from advertising campaigns and personalized email generation to full proposals and drafting e-books. As an example of the latter, she shared how she created a 45-page e-book with fully formatted graphics and logos in about 20 minutes using AI tools.
For market research, AI has access to a vast amount of public data from sources such as the US Census and Small Business Bureaus, and sews them together for detailed analysis.
One client “takes all reviews from Amazon and throws them into ChatGpt to identify potential new features in the product.” Another instance uses AI to scan construction companies' publicly available school board minutes and quickly identifies new, unstarted infrastructure projects and estimated revenue, a task that took weeks previously.
The discussion has been extended to the transformational impact of AI on customer service. APY said tools with AI will replace traditional systems.
“I know how the IVR (interactive voice response) system says, press 1, press 2?” she pointed out in contrast to “a conversational AI tool (it) understands your question and gives you a customized response.”
These systems provide a “very human-like voice that can respond to partial language and predict what you want.” And these platforms can “train human agents on the spot” by understanding the customer's emotions and “teaching agents to say certain things based on what the customer is saying.”
For “repeated and pre-conversations in nature,” the robots are used to “schedule hospital follow-up appointments” or to act as a “medical reception or hotel front desk.” This helps call centres “pass a lot of calls” and make sure the customer is “not on hold for five hours.”
APY also highlighted how AI can help provide better customer service.
Instead of saying, “Here are five articles that may be related to your question,” you say, “Here is the answer to your question.” Apy mentioned the Honolulu-based company Reef.ai. AI “predicts customer termination (when a customer decides to terminate a software subscription) based on behavioral data, allowing businesses to take proactive action to retain customers.”
However, APY also mentioned other considerations associated with adopting AI. She addressed concerns about “hagatsuki.” The AI tool “always trying to give you answers. They make things to make you happy and give you answers.” For mission-critical research, she suggested using different AI tools to fact-check each other.
She highlighted the important need for data privacy and advised users to turn off the settings that allow models to “improve the models for everyone” when using sensitive data. APY also highlighted the possibility of “racial bias, cultural bias” within the AI model, “it's a real, huge danger to me,” and highlighted the human responsibility to understand and mitigate these.
There's a lot to be wary of, but we're here to stay, especially if businesses want to stay competitive and create new revenue streams.
APY encouraged everyone to use this technology. “The only way to learn AI is to try it,” she said. “It's part of the positive social change that comes from jumping in, jumping into the pool and using technology forever.”
