The use of Artificial Intelligence is rapidly growing in all industries. Global spending on cognitive and artificial intelligence systems is projected to reach $52.2 billion by 2022 with a compound annual growth rate of 46.2% from the period 2016 to 2021, according to a recent Juniper Research report.
The biggest area that AI will make impact on in 2018, will be automated customer service at $2.4 billion in investments. The primary goal of using AI across industries is to improve product and service quality. Ranked the second is helping customers get more value from the company’s offerings (particularly in the insurance and commerce sectors). For these reasons, machine learning approaches have been successfully applied to areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to develop chatbots.
In 2016, the market value of chatbots reached $703.3 Million worldwide, and is expected to grow at a compound rate of 35.2% to reach $3,172.0 Million by 2021. As people are growing more familiar with chatbots, 35% of consumers want to see more companies using chatbots, according to HubSpot. Some of the factors that drive this rapid growth of chatbots, include the rising demand of automated customer service tools and the surge in demand of intelligent customer engagement.
Business Insider stated that investments in chatbots grew 229% between 2015 and 2016. All industries are racing to embrace this technological advancement. According to an article in Retail Dive, retail industry is expected to be the leading spender on AI and chatbots by 2018 with an average of $3.4 billion. Banking and finance industry will rank the second with $3.4 Billion. By 2022, chatbots will be handling at least 85% of all customer service interactions. Manufacturing will spend $2 billion, followed by $1.7 billion investment in healthcare in AI-powered diagnosis and treatment systems. Almost 90% of the healthcare industry have already invested in AI and is expected to reach 100% by 2020. The energy industry uses 13% of its AI in customer service in comparison to almost 74% in IT.
Other industries like, housing, events, governance, trade unions, accounting, construction, service desks, and development are also investing heavily in AI, yet their spending on chatbots and customer service areas is less than in the aforementioned industries due to spending priorities.
The benefits of using chatbots are plenty for both industries and consumers. On average, chatbots could save businesses up to £6 billion over year cross industries, according to a research conducted in 2016. Moreover, 34% of executives say that using chatbots eliminated unnecessary tasks, allowing them to shift their attention to deep thinking and creating, reported PWC.
When customers were asked about what mainly motivates them to use chatbots, 69% said that getting an instant answer to their question is the main reason, according to the 2017 chatbot report. 48% of the users reported that they would rather get in contact with a company through live chat than any other mean of contact.
