By 2020, 85% of a client's relationship with a business will be managed without interacting with a human, according to Gartner research. That doesn't mean we'll all be rushing out to buy thousands of Pepper robots, but it does mean there are plenty of things artificial intelligence (AI) can help with right now to make your CX better – for customers and for your business. Here are five of them. Image recognition is one of the most rapidly improving areas of AI. The ability to look at pictures and work out what they are powers Neiman Marcus's Snap.Find.Shop app.

On my way back from Singapore a few weeks ago, I had the chance to watch an interesting TED Talk about robots taking human jobs. It got me thinking: What would happen if robots and machines took over? Would they take every job imaginable, or just take over a few industries? Will your job become obsolete as machine learning and artificial intelligence continue to ebb into even the most mundane tasks of our daily lives? My perspective is that machines and robots will make our lives easier, but not take everyone's jobs.

What if you had a colleague who would take care of all the dull, routine tasks without complaining? A colleague who lets you do interesting and challenging tasks, helps you solve them, then happily lets you take all the credit. A colleague who stays after office hours doing prep work for you so you will have a good start the next morning? Meet machine learning, your new favorite colleague, who will dramatically change customer service both for customers and for customer service personnel. It's estimated that 70%-80% of insurance claims are pretty straightforward, so this is an area where machine learning algorithms can find the right solution.

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, chatbots, Internet of Things…customer service is experiencing a revolution. The balancing act between customer satisfaction and cost control is getting easier thanks to intelligent technology. It has been estimated that by 2020, 85% of all customer interactions with a company will be handled without human involvement. In many cases, customers don't care how they get their answers – as long as they get them quickly and conveniently. However, not everything can be automated.

Artificial intelligence is more than just a buzzword, and is now deeply embedded in our daily lives, whether we recognize it or not. Simply put, machines are learning how to assist us with the tasks that we'd usually have to undertake, and they are getting incredibly good at their jobs, allowing us humans to do more. With machines now able to complete mundane tasks, we can focus on diving deeper into the things that previously we never had the time to accomplish. Since we live in a global economy where sales happen at all hours of the day and consumers can purchase goods from all over the world, businesses need to be operating on all cylinders, always ready to serve their customers. AI in e-commerce allows organizations to collect and analyze data in real-time, allowing businesses to be more efficient, and to personalize the customer experience based on what they know about that customer. The ability of e-commerce sites to offer 24/7 support to their customers is thanks to chatbots.

Organizations are transforming their sales functions with artificial intelligence to stay ahead of the game. If you have not yet embraced the trend, you are missing a crucial competitive edge. The emergence of vast amounts of data from multiple sources and platforms, generating new information every minute, has given companies more consumer information than they've ever had before. Technology is getting smarter as it continues learning and optimizing recommendations. A study published in MIT Sloan Management Review reveals that 76% of early adopters are targeting higher sales growth with machine learning.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has made a lot of news recently. While much of that talk involves predictions of gloom and doom, that's not my focus here. When it comes to e-commerce, and really commerce in general, AI is poised to begin disrupting the entire industry. An interesting convergence is taking place; one that will have massive implications in the way merchants sell their products and services and the way consumers buy them. We are setting the stage for an era where transactions will take place with no human interaction at all.