The conversational AI industry has exploded and has seen immense growth in the last decade. The chatbot industry will reach 454.8 million U.S. dollars by 2027, from 40.9 million dollars in 2018. Pandemic accelerated this growth with the digital transformation taking center stage and becoming a necessity for every business to stay afloat during the crisis. According to Modor Intelligence, the Asia Pacific region is the fastest-growing market investing in AI chatbot technologies. It’s not only demand from the business end, but customers have also warmed up to interaction with AI chatbots 67% of global customers have communicated with a chatbot in the past 12 months. More than 40% of people believe that until their queries get answered, they don’t mind whether it’s a live agent or an AI chatbot.
AI Chatbots Transforming Businesses
Initially looked like a customer service tool, but due to advancements in technologies like Natural Language Understanding and Machine Learning, today, AI chatbots are adding value across business processes. AI chatbots are being utilized by brands to build a solid sales pipeline, achieve marketing objectives, enable commerce, drive engagement, induce brand loyalty, deliver delightful customer experiences, and much more! Industries like eCommerce, Retail, Healthcare, BFSI, Real Estate, Education, and Travel have been at the forefront in reaping the benefits of conversational AI technologies.
Conversational AI’s expanding capabilities and tailor-made solutions are helping other businesses leverage AI-chatbots’ abilities.
AI chatbots are revolutionizing how companies operate; let’s look at the top AI chatbot trends for 2022 and how they will shape businesses.
#1 Conversational AI Chatbots for Messaging Platforms
59% of global shoppers want to connect directly with brands through messaging services to place orders and complete purchases. Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp have become platforms for consumers to discover, browse and buy products. To an extent, 40% of consumers globally claim that chat is how they first started shopping online.
Having an AI chatbot helps brands to tap into this vast potential and have a personalized interaction with the customers, where they are spending their maximum time. By devising a chatbot marketing strategy, brands are transforming these platforms into top channels to acquire, sell and retain customers. Sales through the social platforms are predicted to value at $605 billion by 2027.
Read more to learn about AI chatbot marketing.
#2 Conversational AI-powered Search
With AI chatbots proving their merit in helping customers navigate and find what they are looking for as quickly as possible on a brand’s digital avenue rather than having to scroll multiple pages. They are now envisioned to become part of the search bars and reporting systems. With AI chatbots, the search would become even more relevant by understanding the intent and picking up terminologies and slang, providing results based on the previous conversations.
In its I/O 2021 keynote, Google talked about making search more conversational with its new LAMDA AI-Language model. The idea behind the model is to create search results that go beyond a list of links, where the user gets engaged in conversations while getting their queries answered.
#3 AI Chatbots To Deliver Personalization
Today customers are looking for personalized experiences, with 80% of them agreeing that they are more likely to purchase from a brand that offers it. Conversational AI sees continuous innovations to fulfill this expectation at scale.
With a powerful recommendation engine in place, AI chatbots can be trained to provide expert-like guidance, understand the intent behind the purchase, provide relevant buying suggestions, and suggest the right add-ons at the right time, improving the overall customer experience.
#4 Voice Is The Future
By 2024, digital voice assistants will reach 8.4 billion units. Customers look at voice assistants as a tool helping them do their daily chores more quickly and smartly. Some of the everyday use cases of voice assistants: search the answer to a query, send a text, shop, etc.; manufacturers are focused on improving the performance of voice assistants so that people can use them for more critical operations.
#5 Specialised AI Chatbots
According to Gartner, the AI chatbots targeted toward specific sectors will get a greater acceptance in the coming time. The chatbot industry is expanding rapidly with many new entrants. Companies will now look at chatbot companies that provide solutions for their sectors and issues when choosing a supplier. Healthcare is one such sector where companies would look at the specific abilities and experience of an AI chatbot provider company. During the pandemic, there were more than 1000 covid-19 specific chatbots available.
#6 Conversational AI for the Meta World
Conversational AI would be the backbone for the success of the Metaverse. For each virtual space, AI chatbots will be required to guide and support customers at each stage to create an immersive experience for the users. With brands already flocking to ride the Metaverse wave, 71% of global executives believe it will positively impact their organizations. Meta is spending heavily on developing robust Conversational AI technologies that can humanize each element and enable natural conversations in varied situations.
#7 AI Chatbots With High Emotional Intelligence
One of the areas of research in Artificial Intelligence is understanding human emotions. The global emotional AI market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 11.3% and reach US$37.1 billion by 2026. Advanced facial emotion recognition, eye-tracking technology, and analyzing video interactions in-real time are some of the vital focal points.
In addition, work is being done on creating digital avatars that project emotions so that interacting with an AI chatbot becomes indistinguishable at some point. Sentiment analysis, where AI chatbots become equipped to understand the mood, tonality, and sentiments and customize their responses to deliver tailored communication, is some of the milestones that the AI chatbot industry hopes to achieve.
#8 Low Code Conversational AI Platform
With an urgency to deliver delightful customer experiences across platforms, brands are more inclined toward solutions that can work without much technical effort from their end. But today, most conversational AI platforms offer simple drag and drop experiences with pre-designed modules that can assure implementation without the challenges of building a bot from scratch. And this trend is going to continue with chatbot providers bringing improvements and reducing the complexities involved in building a bot solution. Even Google has utilized its AI tool Dialogflow to introduce a no-code platform, Bot-in-a-box for business messages, allowing brands to deploy chatbots on Google Search, Google Maps, and their business assets.
#9 Increase in Demand of AI Chatbots for Internal Use Cases
AI chatbots are highly successful and have achieved results when used with the external objectives of lead generation, commerce, and customer support. But recently, they are also proving their worth for internal use cases within the organization for functions like HR, IT, Product training, etc., and will continue to do so in the coming time.
According to reports, AI chatbots will help businesses save over $8 billion per year by 2022 and generate $112 billion in retail sales by 2023. A testimony to the potential of conversational AI, chatbots will advance and help brands deliver delightful customer experiences, drive engagement, improve conversions and unlock growth.
TECHVED has been spearheading the conversational AI revolution and has powered AI chatbot solutions for India’s most prominent brands, such as Samsung, Reliance, Indigo, Hike, Snapdeal, Kotak Mahindra, etc. We have transformed many businesses in different sectors altogether such as Banking, Finance, Healthcare, Education, Media & Entertainment and many more.
TECHVED has constantly emerged as the best in this digital era and transformed customer experiences all over the world.
