AI Humans Future of Customer Service: BT's Dr Nicola J. Millard

AIBusiness recently interviewed one of the leading business figures in Artificial Intelligence, Dr Nicola J. Millard, Group Head of Customer Insight & Futures at BT. Nicola will be speaking at The AI Summit in London on 5 May, where she will discuss BT's "SuperAgent 2020" and explore how AI and humans could change the face of customer service together, raising a number of key questions, opportunities and challenges for the customer service sector. AIBusiness caught up with Nicola to find out her views on AI's impact on business overall, as well as her plans for BT's customer service specifically, looking ahead to her keynote at The AI Summit. AI as a standalone technology is not that useful – it is only as good as the data that feeds it and the deep learning algorithms that power it. There are a number of things that are helping it become useful to businesses – things like machine vision, internet of things, clouds of clouds, big data are all grist to AI's mill. If AI can be applied to manage things that we don't want to – like managing our email inbox – we can then free employees up to work on things that add the value of a human brain. Things like creativity, empathy, negotiation, innovation, intuition and emotion are not (at the moment) things that technology can cope with very well.