A passionate professional, Vishal possesses close to two decades of professional experience in the IT industry.

Chatbot
Technology has always been a game changer whether it’s content, data or e-commerce - businesses underwent change to survive due to the changing consumer perception, business value and convenience. Furthermore, the need of digital transformation forced all businesses to go digital and offer to the consumer a bag of increased customer engagement, value through personalization, seamless customer service, brand building for such technology driven products which has helped business exchange details, authenticate and conduct transactions seamlessly making Information available to intelligent non-human support and a platform designed to understand, learn and converse like a human to answer ad-hoc queries in real time.

Chabot’s in Retail: Lending & financial services
The reason most of the banks or fintech and retail businesses are collaborating and investing in chatbot is moving into a forward looking approach to deliver ‘contextual insights’ to the right person at the right time and through a preferred channel.

The non-human chatbot will help transitioning into ‘conversational business with a virtual chatbot assistant in a new age self-sufficient contact center with center agents, minimizing TAT, costs and improvising customer journey. The focus should be on augmentation of human decision making to predict faster than humans with enhanced interactions, else the greater benefit of personalization and differentiation will be lost with automation only.

These intelligent Chatbot technologies are defining the way how a consumer can be engaged at large with value and superior customer satisfaction, loyalty, reducing cost - driving revenue by building an institution with cognitive capabilities as a key to

conversational way of doing business where reach and awareness both are the biggest challenge in India.

Maturity of the AI & Anatomy
Artificial intelligence and Chatbot is no more a buzz word since majority of banks and financial services are already into it, targeting young consumers to hold automated dialogues with the consumer & borrowers for engagements; extending its conversational capabilities beyond a fully automated help desk or a contact center or a virtual assistant which can give real time credit evaluation and approvals to products offerings and augmenting human decision making, thus creating real value. However, that includes human element and increased cost.

In fact, due to the complexity of the AI as technology and digital business transformation going globally, enterprise and technology groups are trying to find the best way AI can be implemented and the value can be reaped. So, AI maturity and strategy involvement in large scale implementation is going to play a crucial value in days to come to meet objective and value.

Majority of the organization are in the state of discussion mode without any strategy, POC and budget. Unless AI is not appearing in use cases, POC and knowledge sharing in large scale, AI transformation will take much time for such organizations. At the same time the maturity of AI technology will also evolve with time and expectations of the project to measure the impact on digital business transformation as the full cycle of end to end implementation is not yet complete which can speak on ROI other than cost and efficiency.

Chatbots - Customer Service & Uniqueness
Chatbots are disruption agents in the area of customer support. Traditional customer support helplines leaves lot of issue unaddressed and impacts customer satisfaction in a larger way.

The whole objective of AI has been to develop human like intelligence and most of the banks and financial services firms have been early adopters of chatbots. It is an autonomous agent which uses AI to create disruptions.

Uniqueness
• The availability of raw data into big data is powering the overall AI and digitalization program.
• Machine learning algorithm like NLP and deep neural networks are providing tools and techniques to convert big data into actions.
• Cloud computing and virtualization have added infrastructure and computing resources to run these programs.
• With mobility in place, the reach of AI and chatbot has increased massively across industry.

Challenges & wide usage
AI has a very wider application across industry and the benefits are immense for the benefit of business and human mankind at large. Primarily, most of the affecting challenges are strategic in nature and also practical in nature – Non availability of use cases to refer and lack of strategy for AI and its alignment is an indication of an unsuccessful implementation. Another critical factor affecting overall delivery is lack of skill availability and the resource skillgap along with the complexity of integration can balloon up the project timelines in absence of scope, misperception and unrealistic planning that too when compliance and laws related with GDPR & privacy act, security and risk related with these highlights major concerns.