Contact Center AI with Ryan Brogan // Cornerstone Hot Takes

Obviously, staffing is a challenge. We’ve talked a lot about HR and finding people. So I know some of the technology around chatbots and stuff like that has been filling the gap a little bit. What’s going on there?

You know, I think the jury is still out on that. It’s been an interesting week, right? So if you’ve been anywhere near Twitter, ChatGPT is everywhere. It’s blowing up and going viral as this conversational AI, and it makes you think about those potential applications in banking.

But I think there’s still a pretty big delta between the potential and...

So what’s ChatGPT, just out of curiosity?

So this is a conversational AI model that, you know, basically people are saying is going to replace Google and search engines, and it’s going to write your term papers for you. You can’t really navigate through Twitter without seeing screenshots of it.

I’ve seen the hashtag. I didn’t know.

Okay. Yeah. But to be clear, it’s not specific to banking, but it certainly makes you wonder, okay, if these advances are happening in more general terms, what are the applications for us?

Yeah, sure.

Exactly. And to date, there has been a pretty big delta between what could be and what is in banking. Most of those deployments that we’ve seen so far are informational, right? You can tell me locations and hours, maybe balances if we have some integration with systems of record.

But we haven’t gotten to that point of truly natural language processing and transactional, “Hey, I can actually take care of things that otherwise would require a human.”

Yeah, exactly.

So I think there’s still a lot of work to be done in that space. One subset, if you will, of conversational AI that I think is more promising, at least in the near term, is biometric authentication.

So the whole “my voice is my password,” or you don’t even know that your voice is your password, but it’s happening in the background.

Oh, nice.

And that’s solving for kind of the triple whammy of what today is a pretty painful, “What’s your mother’s maiden name? What are your loan payments? What street did you live on when you were 12?”

Right.

You don’t even remember, right? It’s inefficient, a bad experience, and it’s not very effective at stopping fraud.

Gotcha. Is the security around it robust enough that folks are feeling comfortable with bank information being used that way? Because I’m having visions of Mission: Impossible recordings playing for voice-activated safes and stuff like that. Is it there yet, or is it still...?

Yeah, it’s probably a bit of a mixed bag, right? How much is sort of, “Okay, this is our black-box algorithm. We can’t necessarily tell you what’s in there.”

The vendor, right? Black-box algorithm, can’t share. It’s all proprietary.

But I think what’s been a bigger challenge so far has just been, can we even integrate to your card processor to put that travel notice in without human intervention?

Right.