Artificial intelligence (AI) and customer relationship management (CRM) … Today, advancements in AI and machine learning are enabling deeper …

When it comes to imagining the future, customer service often gets painted in a dystopian light. Take the 2002 sci-fi film Minority Report. Tom Cruise's John Anderton walks into the Gap, an identity recognition system scans him, and a hologram asks about a recent purchase. There's something unsettling in this vignette--an unsolicited non-human seems to know everything about you (or, as in the movie, mistakes you for someone else). But the truth is, customers today expect this kind of sleek, personalized service.

Back in 2011, Gartner made a bold prediction that "by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human." The convergence of cloud, social, mobile, and information technologies are driving customer support into a "posthuman" age of self-service and automation. We're now well past the halfway mark in that forecast's journey toward fruition, but it can't be described as smooth sailing. While automation efforts may be intended to streamline customer service, making things faster and easier, the result is often the opposite. An Accenture Global Consumer Pulse Survey indicates customers are increasingly frustrated with the level of service they receive from companies.

Longer term, who knows the fate of the human agent. There is certainly plenty of impetus for automation, but for now it can seem like a cool gimmick (see the Henn na Hotel). If used on any scale, AI has to be proven to definitively ease the customer journey and ultimately grow revenue.

Longer term, who knows the fate of the human agent. There is certainly plenty of impetus for automation, but for now it can seem like a cool gimmick (see the Henn na Hotel). If used on any scale, AI has to be proven to definitively ease the customer journey and ultimately grow revenue.