Page 120 - Fortune-November 01, 2018

ar tifi c i al intelli gence + life and lei sure

DRIVING YOUR NEW UPGRADING THE
TRAVEL
CALL CENTER
SO YOU COMPANION
“CAN I HELP YOU?”
DON’T it turns out, has stayed By 2020, IBM estimates
EYJAFJALLAJÖKULL,
that 85% of customer
HAVE TO with us long after the ash service interactions will be
handled without a human
faded away. The Icelandic
volcano that erupted in agent. Machine learning
2010 affected millions and natural language pro-
“THE MACHINE KNOWS WHERE IT’S GOING!” CRIED of fliers and, in doing so, cessing make it possible for
chatbots, enhanced phone
Michael Scott, protagonist of NBC’s The Office, before launching ushered in a new era in support, and self-service
a Ford Taurus rental car into a lake near Scranton, Pa. Getting travel communications. interfaces to perform most
an autonomous vehicle to drive safely under idealized road With information flow ca- of the functions of human
conditions has technically been possible for a while now, but for pabilities strained, airlines representatives.
the real world, the cars are going to have to learn to drive a little discovered social media as As for the 2.7 million
bit more like us. That’s where Comma.ai, a startup founded by an effective, real-time way Americans who are em-
notorious iPhone hacker George Hotz, comes in. Rather than to reach passengers. “Once ployed as customer service
teaching its computer systems what a tree or a stop sign looks that happened,” says Rob representatives? Some may
like, Comma.ai’s Openpilot technology analyzes the patterns of Harles, Accenture Interac- be redeployed to tasks that
everyday drivers to train its self-driving models. The company is tive’s head of social media bots can’t do (like dealing
pulling in millions of miles of driving data from a dashcam app and emerging channels, with truly irate customers).
called Chffr and a plug-in module called Panda, then aggregat- that mode of communica- Companies relying on this
ing that data to create an autonomous system that mimics tion “was an unstoppable technology say it can help
human drivers. The company—whose technology currently force.” Since then, however, eliminate human error,
works with select Honda, Toyota, and Hyundai vehicles—is the number of travelers has drastically increase speed in
styling itself as the Android to Tesla’s Autopilot iPhone, an ballooned, with 1.25 billion data retrieval, and remove
open-source system that is pegging its success to the notion arrivals in 2016, an increase bias from customer service
that users will make it better. Let’s just hope Michael Scott isn’t of 30%. Human-powered interactions.
one of them. —Daniel Bentley social media interaction on And don’t think this ends
that scale is “impossible,”
Harles says. with bots. Swiss investment
Enter the customer bank UBS recently teamed
service chatbot that’s able up with New Zealand A.I.
to answer travelers’ basic expert FaceMe to digitally
questions: Is my flight clone chief economist Daniel
delayed? When is my hotel Kalt to interact with clients
checkout? Booking.com, just as he would in the flesh.
for instance, has a bot that The bank said the avatar,
the company claims can built using IBM Watson A.I.
solve 60% of customer que- technology and trained by
ries automatically. The next the real Kalt, is part of its
stage of this technology is exploration to provide a “mix
for bots to understand the of human and digital touch.”
nature of your trip—busi- —McKenna Moore
ness or pleasure?—and to
make recommendations
based on your preferences
throughout your journey,
ranging from suggesting a
flight upgrade to reserving
a table at the best vegan
café in, say, Pittsburgh. So
what’s currently known as a 16%
chatbot may soon resemble
a full-blown automated PERCENTAGE OF WOMEN WHO SAID
concierge. —Claire Zillman THEY WOULD FEEL COMFORTABLE
RIDING IN A DRIVERLESS CAR,
VS. 38% FOR MEN, ACCORDING TO A
REUTERS/IPSOS POLL

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