Asia/Pacific organizations embrace generative AI to enhance CX

A recent IDC report, “Applications of Generative AI in Customer Experience,” explores the transformative potential of generative AI (Gen AI) on customer experience (CX) and reveals that 70 per cent of C-suite executives in Asia/Pacific are actively exploring or investing in Gen AI use cases, according to IDC’s FERS 2023 Survey Wave 2 APJ results.

Gen AI, a rapidly evolving technology, offers significant opportunities for improving CX. The report emphasizes the importance of experimenting with Gen AI to identify the most valuable use cases, whether customer-facing or employee-facing, for different business models. Technology vendors that effectively identify and test these factors early on, using the right metrics, are positioned to become game-changers in the industry, according to Lavanya Jindal, Market Analyst for Customer Experience and Enterprise Applications at IDC Asia Pacific.

While knowledge management, code generation, marketing, conversational, and design emerge as the top five Gen AI use cases in Asia/Pacific, the report highlights that knowledge management, marketing, and conversational applications hold the most value in enhancing CX.

The benefits of Gen AI in the realm of CX are manifold:

• Hyper-personalized CX: Gen AI enables businesses to offer customized insights that cater to individual customer preferences, enhancing their overall experience.
• Enhanced employee productivity: By automating manual tasks and providing intelligent insights, Gen AI empowers employees to be more efficient, ultimately improving CX.
• Collaborative intelligence: Gen AI helps organizations identify the optimal balance between human and AI involvement, enabling teams to work collaboratively and maximize productivity.

Despite economic challenges, organizations in Asia/Pacific continue to invest in CX initiatives. Several market players, including Zendesk, Freshworks, Intercom, Salesforce, and Baidu, have directed their generative AI efforts towards conversational applications. This highlights the importance for technology vendors to identify untapped areas in the customer journey that can benefit from AI augmentation, ultimately enhancing the experiential value for customers. Gen AI’s capabilities in text summarization, sentiment detection, and manual task automation can significantly elevate customer experiences, leading to improved engagement and retention.

IDC predicts that by 2025, 45 per cent of the top 1000 Asia-based organizations will leverage AI and machine learning (ML) to provide customers with novel and unfamiliar experiences, thereby improving sentiment metrics and brand upsell potential.

As organizations increasingly recognize the potential of Gen AI in enhancing CX, its adoption is expected to surge in the Asia Pacific region, transforming customer interactions and shaping the future of customer-centric businesses.

Tags: APACGenerative AIIDC