three_ways_AI_is_advancing_the_customer_experience

Three Ways AI is Advancing the Customer Experience

Here's a look at how Al is helping to evolve customer experiences—and how frog can help.
Article

Today’s most popular intelligent products may seem like one-off innovations with somewhat narrow applications. Amazon’s Alexa is just a voice-activated speaker that can help you play music or shop for groceries. Apple’s Siri is just a virtual assistant you can use to call a loved one. Google’s DeepMind is just an unbeatable Go! champion.

While these technologies are specialized in their use, they signal new relationships between customer and product. These interactions are just the beginning of ongoing conversations between business and consumer about what artificial intelligence (AI) can and should be able to do for our products and services.

These conversations quickly lead to matters of privacy, data governance and other questions of ownership. They spark discussion around the opportunities and limitations of intelligent products and services—questions that individual industries, entire markets and even legislative bodies are still collectively sorting out in real time. The difference that designers bring, and indeed how business will succeed with AI, is to provide necessary empathetic context for innovation.

 

Designing for Intelligence

Generally speaking, if a data product provides real, personalized value, we as consumers can instill some level of trust and will opt into sharing information. The moment an intelligent system seems to know more than it should, we rightfully get suspicious. Cultural appetites for data sharing, along with the level of transparency into data sources, play a role in how intelligent products are received in the market.

Designing for intelligence is a fine line to walk, but also a human problem to solve. What’s for certain is that in order to truly use artificial intelligence in service of advancing the human experience, human-centered design needs to be at the center of the development of all intelligent systems. As we work with clients to create intelligent systems and AI-enabled experiences, we consider them on a spectrum:

  • Autonomous experiences that seek to replicate human-like logic patterns
  • Augmented experiences that intelligently assist or guide humans in some form
  • Ambient experiences that use machine intelligence to blend digital and physical worlds

With this in mind, here’s a look at how AI is helping to evolve customer experiences—and how frog can help.

Your Data, Your Competitive Advantage
Beneath every intelligent system is a corpus of data that informs how the algorithm interprets information and learns from what it ingests. Then, it’s just a matter of relatively simple math utilized in very specific and strategic ways, combined with a lot of careful data training. For businesses, this data is the difference—the datasets that inform an intelligent system become the competitive advantage an AI embodies. Data curation, too, is a design decision, requiring an empathetic eye on how a system is trained to learn.
1Brand New Interactions

With capabilities like voice, image and pattern recognition, machine learning and gesture control, we are seeing an evolution in human and machine interaction. In addition, the current AI landscape relies on fairly democratized tools, meaning there’s plenty of opportunity for experimentation.

Combining any number of AI capabilities can unlock so many wholly new experiences that it can be difficult to know where to start. To ensure individual AI efforts become a relevant, cohesive experience for every customer, frog often helps clients develop a Customer Experience Design strategy to align the organization and focus initiatives.

By applying technology in service of human needs, entire ecosystems of products and services can deliver on creating exceptional customer experiences. With frog’s Growth Strategy service, we partner with clients to uncover the right AI opportunities. Through our Venture Design service, we partner with companies of all sizes looking to drive growth through new technology and services using lean, agile methods adapted to meet the design process. frogVentures helps specifically startups and entrepreneurs forge new frontiers with AI and other emerging technologies.

2Adaptive Design

Implementing AI is a spectrum, not a single focal point. Flexible, intelligent systems grow and learn with each interaction. Because they can process such complex data, they can be designed to take on layered cues and adapt at incredible speeds.

‘Adaptive Design’ is personalization in action with endless use cases. For example, soon your family car could learn to change the interface of its dashboard to best suit the skill level and preferences of each driver in your household, simply based on how each driver greets it from behind the wheel.

In a different use case, adaptive design could mean being recommended programming on a streaming service that reflects your history as a user in context with the region you’re in, overall user trends, cultural shifts, history of interaction patterns, still more unlikely patterns hidden in the content itself.

3Organizations that Learn

AI is shaping experiences for customers, often in ways they cannot see. Behind the scenes, businesses are experimenting with using AI in internal processes and tools.

Intelligent organizations are learning organizations, able to act on AI insights and opportunities. With Org Activation, frog helps clients understand their readiness to deploy AI by assessing their available datasets and internal capabilities. We work with clients to uncover their customer’s unmet needs, or opportunities to influence change that creates value for the organization. We also use intelligence to iterate on existing offerings and processes so everyone involved with an organization is positioned well to generate value from the inside out.

Author
frog
frog
frog

frog, part of Capgemini Invent is a global design and innovation firm. We transform businesses at scale by creating systems of brand, product and service that deliver a distinctly better experience. We strive to touch hearts and move markets. Our passion is to transform ideas into realities. We partner with clients to anticipate the future, evolve organizations and advance the human experience.

Illustrations byAbe Poultridge
Cookies settings were saved successfully!