Jeannie’s decision-making process for deploying Gen AI for her company, PulsePoint, is beneficial in any case due to the exposure that the leadership is gaining from considering implementing the technology. I believe that PulsePoint should approach the technology with hesitancy, as their company rests on customer service. For this reason, it is crucial that the customers themselves will benefit from the technology.
While it is enticing for PulsePoint to be the first to implement the new technology and position themselves as the most technologically advanced of their competitors, the success of involving Gen AI is not up to the company; it’s up to their customers. If the customers find that the AI chatbot is helpful, consistent, and validates their issues, they would walk away with a positive experience that is reflected in the company’s customer retention rate and customer lifetime value. Yet, even if PulsePoint creates what they believe is the best possible AI chatbot, it still may not be received well by its customers. Customer satisfaction cannot be guaranteed, no matter how amazing the AI chatbot they implement is.
Therefore, it is important for PulsePoint to witness how customers react to AI chatbots similar to the kind they want to implement before they go ahead with integrating it into their own business. Acting as the first of their competitors to involve AI in this way has a large chance of being viewed as impersonal, profit-focused, and out of touch in comparison to their competitors who may still use human customer service agents. The risk of setting PulsePoint apart in a negative way is immense, and they should avoid being the first to use AI for customer service.
Other considerations of implementing AI chatbots include the demographics and values of their customers (whether they value deep customer-company relationships or speed), the impact of this move in the employee makeup of the company (whether more support will be needed to serve more clients), the projected effectiveness of the technology (whether they will retain customer interaction details in a way that makes customers feel heard), and more. These are all points that Jeannie should discuss further with her team as they decide whether or when they want to use an AI chatbot to replace a significant backbone of their company.
