Editor's note: This is AI Impact, Newsweek's weekly newsletter where each week, we will explore how business leaders are unlocking real value through artificial intelligence. Tap or click here to get this newsletter delivered to your inbox. AI transformation gets harder when new technology has to work around established systems, processes and ways of working.
That’s what we’ll dig into next Wednesday, Oct. 21, at 2 p.m. ET, in “Overcoming Barriers to AI Transformation in Legacy Industries,” with senior leaders from Yahoo, EY, Microsoft and Qualcomm. One last reminder that there’s still time to register.
This week in AI Impact, I’m looking at a customer-service wrinkle I hadn’t thought much about before: when customers can hand the work of calling, messaging and following up to software of their own, the number of interactions businesses have to handle could climb fast. Signals from the frontlines of AI adoption Zendesk CEO: AI Agents Could Reshape Customer Service Tom Eggemeier, CEO of customer service software company Zendesk, recently asked a personal AI agent to renegotiate his cable, streaming, internet and family mobile plans. Over four days, he said, it contacted the providers 37 times and saved him $3,150.
Before that, he had gone three or four years without contacting those companies. He now plans to have the agent check with them monthly. Personal agents can repeatedly contact providers without requiring customers to spend the time doing it themselves.
Automation may therefore reduce the effort required to handle each interaction while generating many more of them. Eggemeier said Zendesk is seeing interaction volume rise among customers with the heaviest AI adoption. Automated service can operate around the clock and across languages that businesses may previously have supported only during limited hours, he said.
Handling that volume still requires companies to decide where each interaction should go. Businesses can examine their existing service activity and determine which issues should remain self-service, which AI can handle and where judgment or company policy still calls for a person, Eggemeier said. Customer preference can change where a request lands.
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