The Future of AI is Empathetic AI Agents

“AI can take us to a place where there's no friction,” said Gurdeep Pall, the president of AI Strategy at Qualtrics.

He made this comment on the sidelines of the Qualtrics X4 conference earlier this month, where it unveiled several new capabilities for Qualtrics AI, such as conversational feedback for surveys, Qualtrics Assist, and automated workflows.

In an interview with CDOTrends, Pall described a world where app experiences are completely intuitive and frictionless thanks to the power of AI.

Frictionless experiences

“Imagine [a world] where you're not fighting with friction; there is actually no friction, be it on web or mobile.”

How would this be possible? Using a hypothetical scenario of a customer attempting to change a flight booking using an airline’s mobile app, Pall explained that it would entail creating experiences to serve a number of specific intents or customer needs.

As Pall described it, an AI-infused app would have the smarts to identify the right multi-step task to serve a customer’s need at that point in time – and see it through to completion.

“In the AI world, when you fire up the app, you don't see anything other than what we believe you are here to do. The entire UI is completely adapting itself to the tasks that you're trying to do,” Pall said. “I want to book a trip to Morocco. My entire experience should completely change at that point.”

“Perhaps there would be this chart showing me a recommended hotel, the flight itinerary, airport transfer details, things like that. That's my new UI, which is both predictive and highly adaptive. Because that is exactly what I need to know.”

User experiences as we know them will completely change: “Bad websites today struggle to find out what you want to do; the good ones will naturally know where to bring you.”

AI-powered apps

Empathy will feature front and center in cutting-edge AI deployments, according to Pall, though it would require a deep understanding of an individual to enable. Presumably, this would be where Qualtrics, with its billions of data points around human sentiment, will shine.

“AI will allow you to build that connection with your customers. It's not transactional; it is completely adaptive, and it knows me completely. And because of that, it is highly personalized, predictive, and even understands causal things about me.”

“Based on what I know about you, I can be empathetic in the best possible way. I'm going to be empathetic to this particular person, who loves fast food, loves drive-throughs, because, you know, time is important to them,” Pall said. “You can infer so much stuff out of these sorts of data points. And then you target your experience towards them.”

“The next big wave of post-mobile apps is going to be highly empathetic agents. Because the machines are built in a way that is designed to drive things such as customer satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term value, these are the metrics the models are trained on. So they will get highly empathetic,” he summed up.