Predictions 2020: AI Shakes Up Customer Service Workforce And Operations

Over the past three years, we've been overwhelmed with hype around AI and automation's impact on customer service interactions. By now, we were all supposed to be regularly interacting with voice-based robotic systems that were indistinguishable from human beings -- remember the Google Duplex demo from the spring of 2018? Like those jetpacks we were promised as kids, the future does not yet resemble our science fiction dreams. Improvements to these customer-facing service systems have been much more incremental than revolutionary. But 2020 is the year we will see real evidence of dramatic changes to customer service organizations themselves.