Zain Jaffer is the founder and president of Zain Ventures, a family office that invests in real estate and proptech. Anyone who has tried out ChatGPT in recent weeks will be amazed at the state of artificial intelligence (AI) in the world today. Recently, Microsoft announced that they would be investing $10 billion in OpenAI, the startup that created ChatGPT. Clearly, AI is the buzzword of the times. People have been predicting that AI could replace many of the mundane and repetitive tasks that we humans do.

How long do you think it will be until virtually all tier 1 call center agents are replaced by AI bots? I addressed this a bit in my Machine Learning session at last year's Business Communications Summit. I've been discussing the topic with my colleague Dave Michels, and we agree that the impact of artificial intelligence on contact center operations will be significant. Chatbots are the first step, but automated bots that naturally interact with callers will initially reduce and eventually eliminate all but the most complex human agent interactions during the next decade. The industry has arrived at a formidable convergence of natural language processing, speech synthesis, machine learning, and declining compute costs that will make it possible to produce outstanding customer service outcomes from AI bots within the next five years – if not sooner.