Reporting live from the underworld of customer support.

From HAL's sublime mood swings in Odyssey 2001, the domain of Artificial Intelligence is quickly becoming limited to robotic vacuum cleaners and customer service chatbots helping underwater homeowners buy and troubleshoot the cleaners:

The company’s [VirtuOZ] virtual agents, or chatbots, are programmed to automate sales support for large and mid-sized businesses. By helping online shoppers resolve issues or make purchase decisions, VirtuOz helps web sites cut labor costs. The company claims that its agents, equipped with natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, can provide customer service to clients for one-tenth the cost of a traditional human support team.

If we could automate shopping, nobody would need people in this world.

*chart via marginalrevolution.com

tags: technology, information, commerce, market, 10x