Can you tell us a little about your background and what interested you in pursuing a career in the technology industry?
Prior to joining the Zendesk family, I was the founder of Talkdesk and Cleverly, which was acquired by Zendesk in 2021. In between I also became a Venture Capital investor.
Around 2016, Artificial Intelligence (AI) started to gain popularity in the tech industry, especially among startups. Behind the hype training and deploying AI models was a highly manual process, customised per customer which made it hard to scale. To add to that, due to the effort required to implement AI, it would only be accessible to bigger companies.
Having an engineering background, that got me curious and I decided to study AI to understand the possibilities and limitations of the technology. Eventually, matching that to the CX industry I knew, we co-founded Cleverly which was later acquired by Zendesk.
Please tell us a little about your role as the Head of AI, Zendesk.
At Zendesk, I lead the product development of our AI-related features, which means I am responsible for not only delivering value to our customers, but also ensuring leadership and organisational development. I keep a close pulse on Zendesk’s AI capabilities, identify potential gaps in our technology and manpower to maintain an organisational design that can expand, deliver and rapidly react to market dynamics. This includes growing the machine learning (ML) team, as well as enabling other teams at Zendesk to build ML-powered products while building foundational capabilities and the right infrastructure to support them.
I believe that in the near future, no one will buy software that does not have intelligence embedded in it and it is my job to make sure we are building for that future. Additionally, one of our goals is to innovate for our customers and be their primary partner as they implement AI in their operations.
How do you see AI changing the customer experience industry in the next 5-10 years?
Done right, AI can help CX teams be more consistent, better understand customers and glean more actionable insights. Insights derived through AI can also help businesses identify knowledge gaps and pinpoint problems before they snowball into large volume issues.
Looking ahead, we anticipate that almost all customer service will be AI-first by 2025, and in the future, as AI technology continues to advance, we expect there to be many new use cases that will impact the CX industry, not just customer-facing AI such as front line customer interactions, but also on the business operations side for admins, developers and more.
Can you share an example of a successful AI implementation at Zendesk that has improved customer experience?
We’ve worked closely with many of our customers to implement AI-powered CX tools that are flexible, adaptable and customisable to their ever-changing business needs. One such customer is a global video game developer that leverages our AI tools to quickly diagnose and adapt to dramatic growth. Doing so enabled them to swiftly automate and improve their front-line self-service strategy, resulting in $1.3million in cost savings.
To Know More, Read Full Interview @ https://ai-techpark.com/implementing-ai-in-business/
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