This week we feature an article by Wayne Elsey who writes about how businesses can improve the experiences of their customers with the use of artificial intelligence. With the passing of another year in the digital age, the reality is that we all have to be more aware of how artificial intelligence is entering into our lives. Smart business leaders know that to maintain a competitive advantage, they have to keep an eye on the future. The future is now as it concerns artificial intelligence, and it provides an excellent opportunity for business owners to stay ahead of the competition, but more importantly, offer customers a more tailored and enhanced experience. Roy Raanani, CEO and Founder, Chosus.ai said in a Forbes article that artificial intelligence was being democratized with the creation of open source technology that was leveling the playing field.

Each week I read a number of customer service and customer experience articles from various resources. Here are my top five picks from last week. I have added my comment about each article and would like to hear what you think too. My Comment: So many customer experience strategies (CX) seem to focused on B2C. I've been a strong advocate for B2B companies to understand their customers' expectations are being influenced by consumer behavior (mostly from retailers who deliver an outstanding experience).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer in the future. It's happening all around us, and actually has been for more years than most of us even know. For the past two years, I've been writing about IBM's Watson, Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and other AI systems. I've reported on the last two years of IBM's World of Watson conferences, and today I want to share with you the latest information from the Pegasystems annual users' conference, known as PegaWorld, which took place this week in Las Vegas. This year's focus was on AI, and many of the speakers shared real case studies about how AI is being used to transform the way we do business and how it impacts the customer experience (CX).

It has been predicted by many CX thought leaders and experts that 2017 is going to be a transformative year in the business-customer relationship. The reason for this expected transformation is evident in that customers now have an abundance of channels available to communicate with businesses. Change in our CX approach makes sense when you put human interaction on one end and AI-driven "bots" on the other; serving one common purpose, improving the customer's experience. In 2017 we will see how customers use tools to do more for themselves while supporting them with human interaction when they need assistance. In a recent article, Shep Hyken highlighted that according to Forrester, 72% of businesses indicated that improving the customer experience is their top priority.