Everywhere you turn, people are talking about artificial intelligence (AI). Television commercials are filled with talking refrigerators, accidental Amazon orders and kids using these systems as learning tools. Journal publications talk about how AI and machine learning are the “next big thing.” So, it’s important to remember: AI will not only affect you personally, but it also will affect your contact center—often in many beneficial ways.

Here are a few examples of how AI can save time for your customers and analysts.

Customer Service or Technical Support Centers

Analysts likely are tired of answering the same questions again and again. Generally, if your customer asks for instructions about one topic, the next logical step is that they’ll follow up with a related question. For example, if you were teaching a contact center administrator how to add a new contact center agent to their environment, it’s safe to assume that one of their next questions will be how to assign skills to the agent. You can offload those questions to a chatbot that has access to your internal or external knowledge base.

Look at your most common email, telephone or chat topics and you’ll notice trends. Answering these topics with AI—even if they seem superficial—frees up your team to solve more complex scenarios your customers face.

Financial Institutions

You have some great tools in place to provide the most common answers to questions callers ask account balance, next payment due and last payment amount queries. It’s time to analyze the next iteration of that data and see how you can use automation to help your customers.

If you get a lot of requests for balance increases right before Christmas, your first use of AI could be to analyze the account holder’s information and determine their eligibility when they call or chat. Instead of having your caller ask for this information, you could make it an offer for them. This is all done through AI built around your business rules for a credit increase.

Service Industries

The ways in which service industries can utilize AI are exciting. Imagine that the movie you want to see is sold out, but the IVR recommended another movie with similar actors or in a similar genre. You could be introduced to a new cinematic universe—all because the AI bot knows that people who enjoyed Wonder Woman also enjoyed Star Trek, or that people who enjoyed movies with Chris Hemsworth likely will enjoy Venom or Peter Pan: The Quest for the Never Book. Some of these links might seem obvious, but sometimes the data shows us connections that we never would have considered.

Think Outside the Cart With AI

Your industry might have a better way to tie together purchases. Several online retail sites recommend purchases based on what’s in your cart. However, most of the time, these suggestions are based on other customer’s historical purchases. Sometimes they don’t make any sense. With AI, you can improve these recommendations and even tell customers about items they didn’t know would be available, such as pre-ordering a book by their favorite author.

And integrating AI with your restaurant management software, or point of sale equipment could open your sales to a whole new world. Knowing your customers, or teaching AI about them through data analysis, means it could make recommendations on things like a premium cocktail, an upcoming anniversary or birthday, or which diner regularly orders dessert.

When you think about your customers, their experiences and ways to improve interactions across your business—no matter your industry—you’ll find more opportunities for AI. And these ideas are bound to get you started on your own AI journey.

For more information, check out our on-demand webinar “Build a Bot Series: AI and the customer experience evolution”with IBM and Genesys speakers.