Conversational AI Poised to Be Major Disrupter Posted on : Nov 21 - 2022

Chatbots and conversational AI systems got an extended tryout during COVID as companies scrambled for ways to keep their operations running amid lockdowns. The technology fared better than expected, and now is on the cusp of a major breakout in 2023 as companies look to build on those accomplishments and reach new heights in office automation.

Hayley Sutherland, who tracks the market for conversational AI tools and technologies as a research manager for IDC, says most conversational AI deployments were in pilot or proof-of-concept phases before 2020. But thanks to COVID, which provided an “extreme test case,” companies found success in their conversational AI deployments.

“I think that conversational AI has really earned this place in the last couple of years as a mainstream business application,” she tells Datanami. “Conversational AI has really become business-ready.”

The market has grown quickly, with hundreds of vendors developing a variety of tools, technologies and platforms for everything from first-generation chatbots all the way up to the most sophisticated conversational AI systems. Thousands of successful deployments over the past few years have shown that conversational AI can deliver 24/7 service, as well as a positive financial ROI.

We’ve come very far from the early days of rules-based chatbots, which proved frustrating to many people, Sutherland says. The advent of large language models, such as BERT (open sourced by Google) and OpenAI’s GPT-3, as the core of conversational AI deployments has been a critical factor in their success, she says. View More