Industries Leading in AI Adoption – eCommerce, FinTech, Online Media

Artificial intelligence is the computer’s ability to make decisions, perform tasks, and solve problems at a magnitude as complex as a human. These real-time tasks are carried using algorithms based on Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) that process vast amounts of data. Artificial intelligence is a direct inference to customer service.

Role of AI in Industries

AI has made commendable transitions in established sectors like life sciences and banking, but now, emerging industries are also adopting artificial intelligence and improving their speed of innovation, expertise and customer service.

Large, old, and small firms in eCommerce, FinTech, and Online Media use AI deployments in high densities featuring it as their “key ingredient” technology.

Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, these three top-notch industries have enhanced their business processing using automation through AI and have hugely benefited from it.

Industries Leading in Actual AI Deployment

Let us look at all three of them and how lucratively they have embraced AI:

1) AI in eCommerce

The burgeoning eCommerce industry worldwide has a distinct advantage over brick-and-mortar stores and can effectively use AI to track customer behaviour. Compared to the complex and difficult-to-track physical world, wherein it is impossible to know your customers, their likes/dislikes/ or shopping cart, the digital world is using AI proficiently to track their customers in their virtual world.

AI and ML enable the eCommerce industry to track every click, returned item, reason of return, reviews and testimonials, category browsed, payment method, instant customer feedback, added or removed the item, page turn, and each second spent by the customer on the site. The eCommerce giants, in return, make recommendations and stay connected with the customer even when he is offline.

Pain points and Solutions with AI

1. Previously there were regular customer interactions, using basic chatbots as virtual assistants that only answered simple customer questions that asked customers to indulge in self-service from a company knowledge base or FAQs.
2. Another recent problem customer service teams face is the splitting of channels like phone, chatbot, webchat, and social media offering customer support wherein the customer feels they are being passed on.
3. While CRM data can identify previous complaints or conversations, it’s difficult for employees to read through previous interactions to find the best solutions. So, the customer ends up repeating themselves over and over.

The Benefits of AI in eCommerce customer service 

1. Streamlined customer support through Instant messaging and process automation. eCommerce uses AI to automate customer interaction processes in a single channel, thus mitigating average handling times.
2. Improves customer experience and customer satisfaction and helps implement human agent-assisted chats through the natural language processing technique of AI. It has the expertise to use sentiment analysis that quickly addresses negative language and directs them to human support agents immediately.
3. Better customer relationship building as AI can empower omnichannel customer support to handle and fetch data from multiple locations, like CRM and Customer Service Console, to help solve queries.
4. It makes your customer service agents’ lives easier – They say happy employees fetch happy customers, and AI does just that – it helps take some of the pressure off of agents.
5. Using historic customer data as an AI model takes seconds to analyse potentially hundreds of thousands of previous interactions with customers without having them repeat themselves.
6. The ability to tackle more high-priority support tickets has enabled employees to double their productivity to resolve top priority customer concerns and issues.

2) AI in Media

Online media is more like eCommerce and uses AI to gather data. It is applied for tracking customers, promoting digital marketing, picking up on fraud and fake accounts, cutting down on spam, monitoring users for unethical behaviour, etc.

Artificial intelligence is likely to transform and progress customer behaviours and marketing strategies, build extensive interactions with practice, and consider privacy, bias, and ethics policies. In online media, augmented AI, rather than using AI as a replacement for human managers, will be more effective.

Pain Areas and Solutions offered by AI

1. AI can influence marketing strategies, sales processes, business models, customer service options, and customer behaviours in media.
2. The potential value of AI pertains to marketing and sales.
3. Media industries involve frequent contact with many customers and produce vast amounts of customer transaction data and customer attribute data.
4. AI uses augmented customer information from external sources, such as social media or reports by data brokers.
5. Further AI can be leveraged to analyse such data and deliver personalised recommendations.

3) AI in FinTech

The third industry would be financial firms that are a digital-first sector and are extremely well-funded. FinTech uses AI for several applications like improving app retention, reducing and recording payment fraud, improving in-app recommendations, and other finance-specific use-cases.

Pain Areas of FinTech without AI

1. Cyber Crime
2. Dealing with financial information online like revealing credit/debit and bank account details
3. The burden on employees and poor customer experience
4. Stringent Compliance

Solutions offered by AI

1. AI provides more robust security in the form of chatbots that convert frequently asked questions (FAQs) into simulated conversations. Further, AI can grant additional access and reset forgotten passwords.
2. Artificial intelligence can analyse suspicious behaviours, fraudulent activity, suspicious transactions and boost sensitive financial documentation.
3. AI enhances human workers through automation.
4. AI uses data analytics, machine learning, neural networks, and more, driving new efficiencies and delivering value in all areas of FinTech.
5. Improves customer service – The deep learning algorithms and the ability of AI to understand human language and provides solutions in the form of transactional calls, convincing responses, and traditional helplines with the minimal risk of duplicated processes.
6. Analytics and insights give customers a glimpse into their expenditure, spending based on income, and spending habits, providing personalised financial management.
7. Other benefits of AI are that it encourages reliable credit scores, virtual assistants and chatbots, stock and financial predictions, and regulatory compliance and auditing.

Future with AI

The FinTech landscape mainly invests in AI to undertake financial transactions without a traditional banking intermediary, empowering customers and employees to work smarter. AI holds great potential in every aspect from retirement planning to finan
cial management related to banking, finance and insurance.

How Much they are Investing in it through Venture Funding

These three industries benefit from venture funding, so they attract and retain the best AI talent as they can pay them well.

Venture money allows them to build the right kind of digitally native leadership and technical skills. These industries can further experiment with different business models, develop critical capabilities, experiment with risky ideas, create a culture of iteration and employ different nascent AI techniques or approaches in many AI use cases.

Factors that have led these three Industries to Adopt True AI

The eCommerce, online media, and FinTech are relatively advanced in AI deployments because of their:

1. Digitally Native Leadership
2. They have Big Data in their DNA
3. They focus on developing AI fluency.
4. They belong to the virtual worlds
5. Future of AI – Create a “portfolio approach” for AI projects

Conclusion

Ultimately, industries based on a data foundation are completely dependent on emerging AI applications that can diligently and productively support consumers. AI will scale with the dedicated partnership of retailers and brands to move the technology forward effectively and eventually benefit each segment in the virtual world.