Intercom’s Fergal Reid has seen a lot happen in machine learning in the past few years. He joined the Irish-founded company five years ago, starting the machine learning team in Dublin. Since then, the company has built a lot of automation products, taking into account research and feedback from customers.
“Automation done right, done in a way that’s designed to help the user rather than wasting time, can be a win-win,” said Reid. “You get your answer quicker, you don’t have to wait around and the person who’s running support operations can handle more cases, and their support team isn’t dealing with frustrated users.”
But chatbots have come a long way in recent years, as machine learning progresses. Who could forget Microsoft’s Tay, an experiment on Twitter that resulted in the tech giant pulling the plug on the Twitter-based chatbot after interactions with real-life users saw the bot spewing bigoted material. Microsoft was forced to shut the experiment down after 24 hours.
“So where do we go from there? Well, the technology is getting better and better, and having bots that really understand more and more complex queries.”Reid is predicting a revolution in the next three to five years. “You can see in the in the research area huge breakthroughs all the time,” he said. “The bots are getting more and more convincing and more and more intelligent with what they can do.
Consequently, the simpler it is to implement these AI-powered bots, the more likely it is that companies will turn to them to help power their business. Intercom is adopting the low-code approach here.
And the quality is dire compared to real human interaction