How Generative AI will Transform Customer Experiences – and Why we must Prioritize Responsible Innovation

By Arun Rangaraju

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most exciting technologies in decades, with an exponential adoption curve, making it critical for CIOs and IT leaders to prepare for how it’ll show up across the enterprise. Combining AI technologies, automation at scale and real-time data analytics can help organizations make every employee more productive and every customer experience better.

Generative AI – which not only classifies or predicts, but creates its own content with a human-like command of language – won’t just enhance work, but transform it fundamentally.

AI is placing tools of unprecedented power, flexibility, and even personalization into everyone’s hands, requiring little more than natural language to operate, assisting us in many parts of our lives, taking on the role of super powered collaborators.

Connecting with customers in new ways

Generative AI has the potential to elevate the customer experience through deeper insights to help organizations connect with their customers in new, more relevant ways. For example, customer service, agents can automatically generate knowledge articles from past case notes, and auto-generate personalized agent chat replies to increase customer satisfaction through personalized and expedited service interactions. For sales representatives, they can auto-generate sales tasks like composing emails, scheduling meetings, and preparing for the next interaction. Similarly, marketers can generate personalized content faster to engage customers and prospects across email, mobile, web, and advertising.

Earlier this year, Einstein GPT, the world’s first generative AI CRM technology, was launched, which delivers AI-created content across every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction, at hyperscale. This will transform every customer experience with generative AI.

AI is not what most influences business growth and customer retention, of course. Across every industry, costs and availability of products and services are among several factors which support or hinder companies’ efforts to meet customer expectations. Rather, it is how organizations understand the key dimensions of growth and customer loyalty, and thereafter embed AI into their business processes that will make them more powerful.

Combining generative AI and collaborative technologies will deliver greater productivity for customers and companies alike. AI-powered conversation summaries and research tools, for instance, will help users catch up on what’s happening quicker and instantly find answers on any project or topic — whether they’re researching best practices or prospecting a new account. Drafting messages in seconds to communicate with customers and teams, spending less time crafting replies and meeting notes, means more time putting plans in action.

Accelerating employee productivity and connecting directly with customers will be key drivers of business efficiency and growth.

Making AI a safer and transparent partner

The power of Generative AI is not without risks, however. Although it gets a lot of things right, it can get many things wrong. As businesses look to adapt these technologies, it’s critical that they do so with care.

It is important to embed ethical guardrails and guidance across products to drive responsible innovation — and catch potential problems before they happen. Here are five guidelines to guide the development of trusted generative AI: accuracy, safety, honesty, empowerment, and sustainability.

AI is only as good as the data that’s powering it along with keeping humans in the loop to check and verify. Trust must be the most critical element of its development, the content these models create, and the platforms on which they run. Guidelines are available to help organizations with the responsible development and implementation of generative AI.

To make AI safer and more transparent, we must begin with awareness. Business leaders must educate themselves on the implications of AI and equip users with a better understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. Providing explainability or citing sources for why and how an AI system created the content it did can also address issues of trust and accuracy.

The world must be given good reasons to trust these models at every level. If we can deliver that, without compromise, there’s no doubt that this technology will change the world for the better.

(The author is Arun Rangaraju, Vice President, Business Value Services, Salesforce India, and the views expressed in this article are his own)