2022 was a huge year for conversational AI in the Nordics. Here’s why 2023 will be even bigger.
2017 — welcome to the year of bots!
2018 — no, wait, this is the year of bots!
Each year the general consensus is that this year is when bots will finally make their big splash on the enterprise market. I believe, however, that it is highly dependent on the particular region you’re talking about. In Norway, for instance, 2018 truly was the year when many of the country’s larger financial organizations began implementing conversational AI into their digital strategies. For other Nordic countries; last year also saw some implementation across different industries, but mass adoption is still yet to fully arrive. The fact that Norwegian companies are so far ahead of the curve when it comes to rolling out conversational AI is interesting to note.
Allow me to explain. A typical driving force for adoption that we’ve noticed when determining if a new market is “ready” for conversational AI is its maturity level in cloud solutions and whether it has begun implementing robotic process automation (RPA). In these two areas, there isn’t a great deal differentiating Norway from Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. For Norwegian companies, however, artificial intelligence — and most importantly chatbots — became the “must have” tech hotness for 2018. They couldn’t be seen to be lagging behind their competitors and once major companies began publicizing the kinds of returns on investment they were seeing, everyone quickly followed suit.
Companies in 2018 were focused on having everything planned out and expected to understand what the ROI on conversational AI was in advance. Of course, since AI is still such a nascent technology, the results ride a lot on how much effort you put in and how bold companies are when they make a push into this exciting new channel.
2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 have confirmed this trend.
Therefore, I offer up a few predictions for how I see 2023 shaping up for virtual agents and conversational AI in relation to the Nordics:
Increased adoption of conversational AI
The Nordics have a strong focus on customer service, and many companies (especially in financial services, insurance and telco) have already implemented chatbots and virtual assistants to improve their customer support. In 2023, we can expect more companies to adopt conversational AI technologies to provide better customer service experiences or start to use it for other educational purposes.
Widespread adoption of large language models
Large language models are a type of artificial intelligence that can understand and generate human language at a sophisticated level. These models can be used for a variety of language-related tasks, such as language translation, text summarization, and question-answering. This will allow conversational AI systems to better understand and respond to human language, making interactions more natural and intuitive while simplifying AI trainer’s work - providing them new intents and content to improve the company’s model.
Increased adoption of voice call automation
Voice bots also known as voice assistants, use natural language processing (NLP) and speech recognition to provide fast and efficient customer support. They are particularly useful for handling simple queries and directing customers to the right resources. The rise of smart speakers and virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa has helped to popularize this technology. As voice bot technology continues to advance, we can expect them to become even more sophisticated and capable of handling more complex tasks. Definitely, a hot topic for customer service in 2023!