In his annual letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy described a new world order in customer experience, one that is driven by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI).
"Generative AI is going to reinvent virtually every customer experience we know and enable altogether new ones about which we’ve only fantasized," he wrote. "The early AI workloads being deployed focus on productivity and cost avoidance (e.g. customer service, business process orchestration, workflow, translation, etc.). This is saving companies a lot of money."
Jassy on AI in CX
Jassy explained how AI is touching just about everything but called out by name the following: oding, search, shopping, personal assistants, primary care, cancer and drug research, biology, robotics, space, financial services and neighborhood networks. But, in particular, he had a warning for customer experience professionals.
"If your customer experiences aren’t planning to leverage these intelligent models, their ability to query giant corpuses of data and quickly find your needle in the haystack, their ability to keep getting smarter with more feedback and data and their future agentic capabilities, you will not be competitive," he wrote. "How soon? It won’t all happen in a year or two, but, it won’t take 10 either. It’s moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen."
The purpose of this letter was to motivate shareholders to invest deeply in the advanced technology. He described what is already happening at Amazon, including the production of 1,000 generative AI apps designed to transform CX in shopping, coding, personal assistants, streaming video and music, advertising, healthcare, reading and home devices.
Amazon Web Services is also developing the building blocks for AI to help lower the price and access highly flexible model-building and inference services in Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock, frontier models in Amazon Nova. Jassy explained having to make hefty investments upfront for long-term strategic strength. For example, he explained that investing in a data center is costly up front but then it lasts for 10 to 15 years before needing an upgrade.
"In periods, like now, of unusually high demand (our AI revenue is growing at triple-digit YoY percentages and represents a multi-billion-dollar annual revenue run rate), you’re deploying a lot of capital," wrote Jassy. "We continue to believe AI is a once-in-a-lifetime reinvention of everything we know, the demand is unlike anything we’ve seen before and our customers, shareholders and business will be well-served by our investing aggressively now."
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What is already happening with AI in CX?
In the last year, CX professionals have taken bold steps to experiment with AI, invest in it and come up with a strategic plan. The technology is moving so swiftly that it is sometimes hard to keep up. As use cases surface and the effectiveness of some applications becomes evident, more and more people will be making the move toward AI. Discover some of what is already happening:
Personalization of CX
AI has allowed CX professionals to gather and unify data on individual customers, so they can personalize support and experiences. This goes back to the dawn of AI in mainstream CX. For example, Netflix can curate content that a user is more likely to enjoy based on her previous choices. Ads are thrown in front of a user as he searches for something he needs or wants on the internet.
Now, hyper-personalization is possible. Omnichannel strategies allow agents to provide unique support to a customer, who may be connecting with a brand in multiple ways, including via website, app and brick-and-mortar store.
Read more about it in The power of AI for personalizing CX.
Chatbots and virtual assistants: 24/7 support
Chatbots and virtual assistants are making it possible for company to provide around-the-clock support to customers who are located anywhere. The more advanced generative AI becomes, the better the service outcomes. Chatbots and virtual assistants have already helped some companies reduce wait times, minimize agent burnout and low morale and ensure quicker resolution for customer issues.
Read A customer experience guide to chatbots to learn more.
Much needed help for agents
Human agents need breaks for sleeping, eating and having personal time. AI does not. For years, contact centers have struggled with agent burnout and consequential attrition and turnover. It can make supporting customers challenging.
Read 5 Signs workforce management is hurting CX to understand the struggle of agents.
AI can enhance agent productivity. Many have already taken advantage of generative AI to respond to common problems that are easy to fix. As the technology improves, it will be able to take on more complex issues. In fact, AI agents are already in play to take on some of these duties with little to no human interaction. As a result, human agents will be able to focus on more challenging and creative tasks and relating to humans who still prefer talking to other people.
Agentic AI solutions to up your game is a great read for those who want to take advantage of the latest technology.
Anticipating customer needs
Machine learning and AI have made data analytics easier and more accessible, even to those who might be overwhelmed by numbers. Increasingly, the technology has enabled people to gather large amounts of data, which is ever more readily available, organize it and translate it into actionable tasks. This has allowed CX professionals to note patterns in customer behavior, so they can make thoughtful predictions and anticipate customer needs.
Read CX Network's guide to predictive CX to learn how to use analytics to see into the future.