Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Just About Cutting Costs. It’s Also About Growth.

Automation strategy has historically focused on how machines can do the jobs that people do now. As artificial intelligence becomes more powerful, corporate strategists are asking the same question: can AI do work we now pay people to do?

What if this is the wrong question? When it comes to automating customer conversations with chatbots and AI-driven virtual agents, the real value of that automation may well be in generating revenue and growth, not in cutting headcount.

Already, there are a few notable examples of chatbots generating significant revenue. For example, the casual dining chain TGI Fridays decided to reach out to millennials with an irreverent, brand-appropriate chatbot available through Facebook Messenger and Twitter . As Fridays’ Chief Experience Officer Sherif Mityas explained, “This is an opportunity to think differently about how we engage with guests who talk to us.” It has worked spectacularly well. Fridays’ chatbot has boosted the chain’s takeout orders by $150 million a year.

TGI Fridays’ chatbot was part of the “conversational commerce” gold rush that began in 2016, when Facebook opened up its Messenger system to companies. By 2018, there were more than 100,000 bots on Messenger. But very few had anywhere close to the success that Fridays did.

The reason is that true growth comes not from automation, but from improvements in customer experience. As Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine demonstrated in their seminal book Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, companies that improve customer experience are more likely to see growth in the long run.

So far, it’s mostly customer experience improvements—more specifically, getting rid of friction in customers’ interactions with companies—that is driving growth from automated customer conversations.

Take the satellite TV operator Dish Network. Dish and [24]7.ai (where one of us is CEO) built DiVA, an automated agent, to answer common questions from satellite TV customers. “Our company’s mission is to transcend our industry in customer experience, not just to focus on operational expenses,” explained Lucky Rai, Dish Network’s director of digital customer experience. Dish eventually automated answers for the most common 30% of customer questions, automating 4 million customer interactions per year.