AI is accelerating the move to a touchless world
A new global survey shows an increased use of voice assistants, chatbots, digital auto showrooms, and facial recognition that is expected to continue beyond the pandemic.
While artificial intelligence capabilities have been evolving, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated adoption of these tools and made intelligent machines part of our new normal lives, according to a new report from Capgemini. More than half of the firm’s customers (54%) use AI daily–compared to just 21% in 2018, the report,”The art of customer-centric artificial intelligence,” finds. Sweden, Brazil, and the US have the highest daily interactions with AI.
Contactless or non-touch interfaces are finding their way into numerous sectors, the report said. Over three-quarters (77%) of respondents expect to increase the use of touchless interfaces—such as voice assistants and facial recognition—to avoid direct interactions with humans or touchscreens during COVID-19, and 62% will continue to do so post-COVID.
For example, AI-powered delivery robots are being used in consumer product and retail to get groceries and medicines to people subject to shelter-in-place orders, the report finds. In automotive, dealerships and OEMs have moved to digitize showrooms, offering a fully digital customer experience powered by augmented reality and AI. In the public sector, “AI is a driving force in health and safety, from using augmented reality glasses to check the temperature of hundreds of people in a matter of minutes, or recognizing whether commuters on public transport are wearing face masks or not,” according to the report. Among the other findings: · Consumer trust with AI engagements has increased to 46% (compared to 30% in 2018) · Customer satisfaction levels have fallen to 57% since 2018 (compared to 69% in 2018) · Automotive (64%) and the public sector (62%) have the highest customer satisfaction with AI, followed by banking and insurance (51%) · Consumer products and retail have the lowest satisfaction (55%) The dominant position of automotive can be attributed in part to the widespread use of in-car voice interfaces, the report said. For instance, BMW—which has been deploying its own in-car, AI-based voice assistant for many years—plans to make them more natural, with gesture recognition or gaze recognition capabilities for its 2021 series, according to the report. In the public sector, citizens are increasingly using AI to interact with the government, the report stated. For example, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services’ chat interface receives about 14 million customer queries each year, the Capgemini report said.
