Artificial Intelligence is not going away and it will have a profound impact on the customer experience. Will they be the right experiences? We need to think that through carefully. Now is the time to begin that conversation.

Altimeter is reporting that “In the next five years, machine intelligence will become ubiquitous, and technology innovations, such as Internet of Things (IoT), chatbots, and augmented reality, will proliferate.

“This report explores the impact of AI on the customer experience, lays out a set of operating principles, and includes insight from technology users, developers, academics, designers, and other experts on how to design customer-centric experiences in the age of AI.

“More than anything, business leaders today should begin to treat AI as fundamental to the customer experience. This means thinking about the values it perpetuates as an essential and eventually indistinguishable expression of product, services and the brand experience.”

Key insights from the report include:

• AI is changing the relationship between consumers and brands. Experiences are different when they are informed or delivered by systems using machine learning algorithms.
• Norms that govern normal business interactions are being upended. This has created the need for guiding principles on how to deliver customer-centric AI that take into account: utility, empathy and respect, trust, fairness and safety and accountability.
• Building a culture of customer-centric AI has unique challenges and opportunities. To address these, leading organizations need to look at culture and community, design, data and methodology, and governance as part of organizational readiness.
• A checklist to help organizations think through issues related to AI and the customer experience. The checklist is based on interviews with experts in data science, engineering, customer experience, design and academics.

You can get the report here: http://www2.prophet.com/customer-experience-of-AI