AI and Communities
You’ve probably read the same case studies as me about the ‘industry that didn’t adapt (or change)’. Trains, the ice trade, tour operators, postmen, music etc…you can take your pick, the pattern was the same.
First, they ignored the trend, then they fought the trend, then they were destroyed by the trend.
Did you ever think reading these stories “that won’t happen to me, I’m too smart!”.
This morning is the time to test that assumption.
Are you proactively exploring how you could use AI to reduce your workload by 90%?
What happens to your superuser program when people can just ask Siri or Alexa on their phones and get the best possible answer?
What happens to the community manager when a chatbot can greet members, introduce them to each other, remove bad actors/content better and guide them to participating quicker than they can?
What happens when reports are automatically generated and acted upon?
But people want the empathy of another person doing this work right. No-one wants a machine to do these tasks. People want to feel listened and responded to by a real person.
That’s almost the exact same response our operators, stock market brokers, milkmen, postmen, and checkout assistants used to give (and soon Uber drivers too).
A better expression here is denial.
Artificial Intelligence in its myriad of forms is happening right now on the fringes. It might stay on the fringe for 1 year, even 5 years. But when it moves it will move fast and I’d recommend you take action now.
Who is doing AI and community well? How can you make it work for you? Who can best figure out the shift in work from person to machines?
I’d bet the person who can answer these questions won’t be out of work when the inevitable happens.
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This is a really hot topic. I share my point of view from support community perspective. Many companies invest money to explore a new area. They talk about automatization, cost reduction and many more. It could be something very helpful in many cases even if we talk about existing communities. Starting from seekers needs the most important is to solve the problem nothing more. This is a basic and there is a lot of space to do that in right way. Some people affraid AI, some fascinate them. I see opportunities to use a AI on Community on the other hand it’s hard to predict other people (super users) reaction. I have seen one example on autodesk http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/2787257 somekind of simple use case but we are talking about something bigger as i undestood.
It will change all about conversation customer vs company,community it’only a part of
What I think is that it is hard to apply AI to one community but there will be AI applications developed for community support. Think about topic analysis or sentiment analysis or AI making summaries.
This is so important to be on top of these kinds of trends. If you’re not thinking about how to use AI now then you’re already risking missing the bus. What’s your platform vendor doing in this space? I’m just starting to explore a little in testing around what Salesforce offers here. It’s exciting.