Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Just About Cutting Costs. It’s Also About Growth.

“When it comes to automating customer conversations with chatbots and AI-driven virtual agents, the real value of that automation may well be in generating revenue and growth, not in cutting headcount.

Casual dining chain TGI Fridays decided to reach out to millennials with an irreverent, brand-appropriate chatbot. It has worked spectacularly well. Fridays’ chatbot has boosted the chain’s takeout orders by $150 million a year.
By 2018, there were more than 100,000 bots on Messenger
The reason is that true growth comes not from automation, but from improvements in customer experience.
One tough challenge at Dish was dealing with the flood of late orders for pay-per-view events, like boxing and mixed martial arts matches. When it put virtual agents in place to answer questions and take orders, Dish closed over $6 million in pay-per-view event revenue.

At the marketing services company HubSpot , a Facebook Messenger chatbot suggests useful content, pre-qualifies leads, and connects prospects with HubSpot’s salespeople. Compared to other sources of inbound inquiries, leads that the bot has prequalified are higher quality—they’re 40% more likely to engage productively with a salesperson.
Avis-Budget wondered if the system could help with revenue-generating calls—rental reservations. Before the customer gets on the line with a human, a virtual voice agent can typically collect five key pieces of information first. This saves time for the human agents and makes the whole system faster and more efficient.”

P.V. Kannan is the co-founder and CEO of the San Jose based [24]7.ai, a vendor of AI-driven customer experience software and services.