The Rise of AI in Customer Service: How AI Sales Calls and Chatbots Are Transforming the Industry

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. Today on the podcast, we're going to be talking about how AI is absolutely revolutionizing customer service. We're going to talk about two companies and some big plays.

0:38They've just made two new AI startups that I believe, whether it's them or someone like them, customer service is completely changed. And typically when I talk about AI and kind of some of the revolutions in AI, I'm like, you know, like some jobs will be lost, a lot more will be created. in the case of customer service i think this is an entire industry that by and large will be completely replaced by ai um there will be you know some people for like more really complex tasks that will still be around that will be needed but customer service uh the way we know it today i think a majority of that is going to get replaced by ai number one phone calls and number two chatbots all of it um is going to be replaced is that a good thing is are a lot of people are going to lose their jobs.

1:20That's for you to decide. That's for people to discuss. I think it's going to be incredibly disruptive. So today I'm going to talk about the tech that is coming down the pipe, some new companies that have just come out, and where I see this going in the future. So the first one I want to talk about is there was recently back on the, about a week ago, there was a tweet from Sumit Shum, who runs an e-commerce company, and it got a lot of publicity this thing ended up getting articles written by the BBC CNN pretty much all made business insider all big newspapers were writing articles about this specific tweet and what happened essentially he said we had to lay off 90 % of our support team because of this AI chatbot tough yes necessary absolutely the results time to first response went from 1 minute and 44 seconds to instant.

2:10Resolution time went from two hours and 13 minutes to three minutes and 12 seconds. Customer support costs reduced by 85%. Here's how he did it. He goes through a thread of the entire thing. But of course, the, you know, the response to this was a lot of people complaining, saying, you know, you're trading 90 % of your customer support for, you know, this cheapy GPT text wrapper. I think he had to keep 10 % of his support team because they obviously had to, they had to respond to tougher responses. I think for his company, it was kind of necessary because they needed to achieve profitability. This was a big cost that they were losing a lot of money on.

2:48So, I mean, I'm not justifying if it was a good or bad thing. I'm just saying whether we like it or not, AI and these chatbots can do a lot of the same things as customer support. So inevitably, that entire field, that entire profession is going to get, I believe, largely wiped out. So, of course there's the this whole chat bot thing and people say well okay what about like a lot more complex things and also what about things where you want to talk to an actual person not everyone wants to talk to a chat bot for customer support um there was another company that just came out and it would it's called um it's called air ai and there was a tweet essentially by this guy named caleb matic who was announcing it and he said conversational ai is finally here introducing air air can perform full five to forty minute long sales and customer service calls over the phone that sound like a human and can perform actions autonomously across five thousand unique applications it's kind of like having a hundred thousand sales and customer service reps at the top of a button um then he's you know trying to get people to sign up for his beta he said this is not just some hype twitter demo it is currently on live calls talking to real people every single day profitably producing for real businesses and it's not limited to any one use case you can create an ai sdr 24 7 cs agent closer account executive or prompt it for your specific use case and get creative therapy talk to aristotle etc it's only limited by your imagination reply beta to be in in the beta thing he said also if you're a developer builder who wants to innovate at the top whatever he tries to get people to join his team so all in all i've looked at the demo of this product and he has it demoing like someone calling like it essentially it calls someone and it's like, hey, we saw that you were on the Tesla website looking at the Cybertruck, you know, we're wondering or one of the Tesla Model Y or something.

4:38It's like, we're wondering why you like, you know, dropped off and didn't end up buying it. And anyways, it has this whole conversation, which actually was really good. It wasn't a high pressure salesman. It was like a low pressure, like really understanding salesman trying to chat with someone about like why they abandoned a product in their car. And it ended up being like a really, really great conversation. The one thing I'll say in its current state, there is a little bit of a lag between when you talk to it and it responds, maybe like two seconds, sometimes three seconds. And it seems like just a tiny bit awkward where, you know, you typically if you're talking to someone, especially a salesperson, I think they don't want to leave a lot of white space or white noise.

5:16They want to have immediate responses and talk really fast to keep you thinking about what they're saying. So in this case where it had like a little bit of a delay, like it's not a big delay because I've like I'm actually very very impressed because the amount of time it takes to listen to what they're saying compute it think of a response translate that into like audio because audio it takes time to um get the the audio generated like I'm really impressed they're using very fast computers they're using a very solid system to get this done so I'm actually really impressed with the thing um and here's the thing at the end of the day uh the bandwidth and like the compute power is only going to get faster and better.

5:52So the latency will get reduced and perhaps the vocal inflections, which as it was, was pretty great. Sounded like you're talking to a human. Of course, everything can get better. Everything can get more realistic. Like give this thing a year tops and you will have fluent conversations. Now, people have talked about a lot of really different, really interesting, different innovations that are going to happen. One, as you can imagine, is the ability, let's say you have a customer service department, a call center, and they're specifically trained to help you with something there's no way tech can solve, right?

6:26But they're based in the Philippines or they're based in, you know, India or somewhere where there's an, it's typically cheaper to hire people from those places. You're trying to service, let's say, the UK or trying to service Canada or the United States where they have, you know, you have different accents. imagine just turning a voice filter on so someone from India sounds exactly like someone from Canada you go a step further and you say someone from Baltimore is calling and it translates the voice of anyone on one end to sound exactly like a Baltimore accent now of course there's like different things we say there's different phrases that might be common in India or that might be common in the Philippines that are not common in United States or even things in the United States that might not be common for the United Kingdom.

7:10So there's definitely that aspect. But going a step further, translating someone speaking in any language, so it doesn't even have to be English to English, but any language, you could have it translated and voice filtered over. So you could actually get people that don't even speak English. They might only speak like Arabic or French or anything. And they could be customer service agents, which is actually kind of interesting, right? Like let's say you wanna have your headquarters in one country and you don't want to have to, but you need customer support for people in other countries that speak other languages, you could essentially get a customer support person that could speak any language.

7:48So you could do language translations, you can do accents, you can do, I think it's just going to get completely taken over. And then that is like voice filtering, but beyond voice filtering, I think eventually, inevitably, in the very near future, I mean, it's already there to a small degree, but it's only going to get more, eventually inevitably it's going to get to a point where it's not a human it's just the ai responding and they're gonna you're just gonna have this thing built into your back end um shopify is gonna have plugins that help with this all sorts of different software providers are going to come up where whatever your business or your store or whatever your product is uh you'll have one of these customer support bots that you just give it permissions it's like you can refund a customer if they have X, Y, and Z issue up into X, Y, and Z account, like this is like a X, Y, Z amount.

8:37These are our customer service terms of service. This is what we will do. This is what we won't do. This is why you can like quote this back to people. But if you have a really strong documentation and you plug this thing into your system and you set like limits for what it can and can't do, honestly, these customer service bots can fix a lot. Now, you know, I've also had a lot of experiences where, you know, I'm calling, for example, Bluehost or some sort of website provider, and I'm getting a tech on the other end, because there's some sort of issue, and they're trying to help you with that.

9:06Definitely something I think might be a struggle for a completely automated bot, this would be something easier for salespeople or whatever. But you know, I think that goes into a whole nother, a whole nother concept, which is like, the sales departments are going to get very disrupted by this isn't just customer service, it's anyone that's like, vocally doing something over the phone, sales departments, customer service, it's going to be really, really massive. And like they said, you know, account executives, agents, all of that is going to be very, very disrupted. Now, that's the call side.

9:40But I think there's going to be a lot of things we need to watch in the future. This is going to be a very rapidly evolving space, and we're going to need to keep very close tabs on what's going down and how this is evolving.