AI for me personally is a double edged sword, or possibly a triple edged sword…if that even exists. On one side you have this incredible technology that extremely talented people are using to create industry defining things. The innovation is beyond anything we could imagine 20 years ago. The second edge is data. Artificial intelligence is not the stereotypical human-like appearance of a holographic person. AI can be massive amounts of data that is collected (like it is now) to personalize online marketing and advertising…etc. The third side is artificial people and faces that are created to imitate a real person, both digitally and robotically. Think things like animated movies, video games, and the topic we are covering today, customer service representatives.
So, what about the past? Around 20 years from today, something roughly close to the year 2000 and Y2K, computers couldn’t even create or display a date past December 31, 1999, so I’m not quite sure how many people were thinking about artificial intelligence and its utilization in apartment leasing. Now, I’m able to set reminders and look up infinite dates on a calendar from my small computer (iPhone) in my pocket. We’ve made it past Y2K, the end of the world in 2012 so now we’ve had a bit more time to think about AI and apartment leasing.
Before digging into the future of AI, let’s think about a handful of things AI is accomplishing right now in the tech industry.
- Apparently, AI pets are a thing-I don’t know whether to be concerned or excited about this. In my opinion, the whole point of a pet is having a companion with it’s own personality that is easier to train and is less responsibility than say…a child. So why a robot pet? I have to say my biggest concern would be going for a walk and the pet’s battery dying halfway and having to carry 50 pounds of metal in the shape of a dog back to my house
- Most AI bots are female and AI can recognize emotion-I am grouping these two together because they raise some super cool points about user preferences. One of the most controversial things about AI is users getting creeped out about un-real things looking real. User experience plays just as big a role in AI as it does in something like a phone app. AI has to be built in a way where users will feel comfortable using them the way they were meant to.
- Humans can develop romantic relationships with AI-This may be the weirdest out of these three, and also may fit into the future category. But, according to David Levy from the article linked above, and a student in this field, he believes that marriage between humans and robots will be made legal by 2050. I will leave that one here.
Now, the future. I reached out to a couple of our developers who work with our Digital Humans at Quext and asked, “What will AI customer service look like 20 years from now?”
“I’d guess that AI will move further into the background and be less flashy. Instead, it will draw on massive amounts of data collection to predict each consumer’s needs based on their behavior and patterns. This will come at the expense of privacy. All online and in person activity will be analyzed by AI and used for marketing. I think it’s possible that AI will completely take over the leasing process, with minimal person-to-person interaction before move-in.”
Definitely a little less out of pocket than human-robot relationships, but a much more confident look into 20 years from now. Big data may be less flashy to most of the world, but what about the flashy parts of AI customer service 20 years from now? We’ll finish it up with this clip from Tom Cruise in the “Minority Report”.
