Helpshift and Alegion on AI customer support: It can field 911 calls … or PUBG woes

If you’ve reached out to customer support recently, there’s a pretty good chance your email, chat message, or phone call was fielded by artificial intelligence (AI). Gartner reports that some 85 percent of business-to-consumer transactions will take place without human interaction by 2020. And according to Linda Crawford, CEO of Helpshift, and Nathaniel Gates, founder and CEO of Alegion, that’s largely a good thing.

Crawford and Gates participated in a panel discussion at VentureBeat’s Transform 2018 summit, where they spoke about the (sometimes uncomfortable) marriage of AI and humans in the customer service space.