“We’ll see the AI hype cycle begin to wane across customer experience (CX), with disillusionment as companies realise AI is not a panacea to everything, and that AI use alone is no longer a differentiator — every company can utilise AI anytime they want. Businesses will have to address the challenges associated with AI and accept that it won’t solve all their problems.”
Benjamin Humphrey, CEO and founder, Dovetail
”The biggest shift we’ll see in customer experience in 2024 is going to be with an infusion of AI to personalise the product experience, which will enable companies to customise their products for different personas. Ultimately, this personalisation won’t just create faster onboarding, a more tailored experience, better support, and improved customer satisfaction — it will create an entirely different customer journey based on each person and their specific use case.”
Prashant Mahajan, CEO and founder, Zeda.io
“There will be a transition from fear of AI to AI FOMO with marketers embracing AI’s ability to augment marketers’ skills and connect with consumers in a hyper personalised way.
“Generative AI will enable a new era of dynamic digital ads that adjust each viewer’s copy, style, and content in real time. This hyper personalised approach will lead to higher engagement as the ad resonates better with the individual’s needs and interests.”
Einat Weiss, CMO, NICE
“Advancements in generative AI will drive ambient computing as devices become more prevalent and capable, and form factors become more flexible.
“Authorised agents that can take actions from the results of multi-layered interactions could unlock new ways of doing both consumer and business transactions. Our world and day-to-day items that we use and interact with will become a lot more capable, and perhaps a new model would emerge where generative AI is the top-level layer through which we interact with underlying systems based on intent.”
Art Hu, SVP & CIO, Lenovo
“It’s predicted that we will see an upward trend for conversational AI that will allow organisations to interact with their customers in bold new ways. Although personal human-to-human interaction in service will remain important in the future, the use of AI in self-service will increase exponentially in the coming years.”
Dirk Martin, CEO, Serviceware
“We will see an emphasis from organisations to develop their own specific chatbots to drive better customer experience and optimise employee productivity. Domain-specific chatbots are more difficult to build than general-purpose LLMs, but they can provide a much better user experience.”
Bob Friday, chief AI officer, Juniper Networks
“AI will give customers a highly personalised single point of contact for all inquiries, serving as an ‘AI Butler’ capable of dealing with multiple requests across different platforms and businesses. This will break down one of the major frictions in customer service: siloed interactions with brands, necessitating multiple phone calls and putting undue strain on contact centres.
“The AI butler will allow customers to schedule a car appointment, swap out their new shoes for a different size and inquire about an insurance issue during one seamless, interconnected interaction.”
Barry Cooper, president, CX Division, NICE
“Consumers will flock to generative agents — adding them to their smartphones and wearables, and using them to make all aspects of their lives easier, from shopping and budgeting to looking after their wellbeing.”
Bill Staikos, SVP of Executive Advisory, Medallia
“More and more companies will make it perfectly clear when you’re interacting with AI and not a human, either by a distinct label or naming their bots in a way that makes it very memorable each time you’re chatting. This is good for transparency.”
Dennis Woodside, president, Freshworks
“In the coming year, it’s set to make waves in British retail, opening doors to streamline operations, jazz up content creation, and amp up the overall customer experience. Yet, finding that sweet spot between human creativity and AI efficiency is key. It’s not just about incorporating AI; it’s about doing it responsibly and ethically, ensuring it complements rather than replaces human input and creativity.
“However, a looming challenge in UK retail is the surge in AI-generated fake ratings and reviews, bringing the risk of everything from misinformation to downright deception. Keeping user-generated content (UGC) genuine and authentic is a must not only in the year ahead but also indefinitely.”
Ed Hill, Senior VP at Bazaarvoice
“While generative AI is still relatively new to the business toolbox of most retail brands, over the last year it has certainly matured and advanced in its accuracy at an astonishing rate. Over the coming year, we can expect more organisations to start to understand exactly where it can deliver value, beyond generating amusing poems, memes, and synth music.
“In terms of CX, some of the more practical and impactful potential uses include generating dynamic, hyper-personalised marketing campaigns and personalised user guides, or streamlining customer service and gaining deeper insights into customer loyalty by analysing behavioural data.
“However, maintaining transparency and customer trust will also prove pivotal for brands looking to mobilise generative AI. The greatest and most fundamental trust generator is accuracy. Retailers looking to leverage generative AI in a CX context must bear in mind that these tools may not always produce correct results and that human oversight is still very much necessary –after all, it takes a great deal longer to build up loyalty and trust in a brand than it does to lose it.”
Craig Summers, MD UKI, MEA & Nordics, Manhattan Associates:
“AI will transform bioengineering, but only if you let it lead. For AI to really lead the way in 2024, we need to automate the generation of data and ensure robust metadata capture. Additionally, we have seen large AI models in very distinct parts of the engineering biology workflow, particularly protein engineering. We are still at the beginning of this revolution, and there are still massive opportunities for AI in organism engineering, process design and precision/continuous fermentation.”
Dr Russ Tucker, co-founder and CEO at twig
“Automation is high on the list for executives, but I expect to see faster adoption of AI software in the finance function, which has often has often been described as the canary in the coal mine for new technology. CFOs will use AI to unburden their teams from mundane, time-consuming tasks like invoicing and contract analysis and free up resources for strategic projects.
“As well as bringing obvious benefits, the AI arms race presents a serious budgeting challenge for the modern CFO, who will need to closely scrutinise software purchasing. Legacy products will be under the spotlight as new players emerge, presenting a potential new dawn in lots of SaaS markets with companies less willing to stay loyal to the big software players if they can’t keep up.”
Eldar Tuvey’s CEO & founder, Vertice
“Imagine a trading floor where every call and message is monitored. Certain phrases or words will trigger an automated alert to the compliance team. These alerts are typically sorted into three tiers of concern. A low-level alert might be triggered by a trader swearing in a conversation. These are common occurrences that result in hundreds of daily alerts, usually reviewed manually by offshore companies. This traditional review process is time consuming, open to mistakes and inconsistent.
“Enter generative AI, with its dual capabilities. Firstly, it can spot the misdemeanour in real-time. Secondly, it can understand the context to see what risk it poses. If someone swore, perhaps because they were quoting a strongly worded news story, it’s not a risk. Generative AI can tell the difference between that and someone using bad language in anger, thereby reducing false positives.
“In the coming year, financial institutions will look at how these AI and automated decision-making processes can be explained, recorded and saved. However, it can’t be a “black box” that holds the fate of a trader within. By creating an audit-friendly trail, businesses will improve their chances of avoiding regulator penalties.”
Robert Houghton, founder and CTO, Insightful Technology
“When it comes to AI, telcos’ focus in 2024 needs to be on utilising it for more creative 5G services. The fact is that while every other industry is embracing AI, implementation remains limited for telecoms’ specific needs. While they can benefit from efficiency gains for internal operations, large language models’ focus on text generation and interpretation is less useful for telcos than other industries. To overcome this, they need to embrace more creative use cases which could make AI a 5G driver over time, shifting it from cost centre to business enabler.”
Christian Bucholdt, AVP Engineering, Persistent Systems
“Generative AI was the big tech story of 2023, and in telecoms, we’re starting to see Communication Service Providers (CSPs) use AI to improve operations — a trend set to continue in 2024. With that said, not all will generate the same results in delivering business value.
“One area in which GenAI can provide a quick win in 2024 is customer care. Most consumers prefer calling CSPs when they have a question or issue. As for business customers, the majority don’t have a choice since many CSPs don’t offer B2B digital engagement channels, meaning they must get in touch via call centres.
“Generally, people prefer speaking to humans when they need support, so it’s not a case of GenAI replacing the call agent, but acting as copilot, providing the agent with the information required to assist their customers, increasing first call resolution and call throughput that is clearly needed in 2024 and beyond.”
Martin Morgan, head of Digital Marketing, Qvantel
“The artificial intelligence (AI) market will start to consolidate, as the well-funded early starters will put newcomers out of business in 2024. Funding of AI organisations has boomed over the last few years, and it’s effectively too late for new AI startups. Every time one comes up with an innovative idea, a larger organisation like OpenAI — with bigger teams backed by a $13bn investment from Microsoft — can replicate it by simply adding a new API. It feels like history is repeating itself, as the same thing happened with small innovative cloud vendors that were either bought or put out of business by the large hyperscalers. In the EU we will also see the burden of regulation limit or slow development of solutions that use high risk AI.”
Chris Royles, EMEA Field CTO at Cloudera
“That’s because advances in generative AI learning have enabled us to create training data to train ML models used for AR in new ways, and ultimately, train AR much faster. When we build AR experiences, it’s important for this technology to be able to understand and map the different objects and scenes around us, so we can add an exciting digital layer that elevates our experiences.
“Having the ability to achieve this more quickly and in greater detail will allow us to create even more immersive experiences that will create value for people and businesses. This year, we’ve seen AR creators and developers use our AR platform in all kinds of new ways, including to transform the way we experience art, fashion and travel. It’s unlocked greater creativity and, therefore, new experiences for Snapchatters.
“In 2024, we expect to see even bigger and better AR experiences created across the world. For example, this year we used AI and ML to create an incredibly realistic Barbie Try-On lens to coincide with the blockbuster film release. It went on to be our best performing body lens ever!”
Qi Pan, director of Computer Vision Engineering, Snap Inc
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