AI Revolutionizes Customer Support: Cutting Costs and Enhancing Efficiency (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: While use cases for AI continue to grow, there is one industry leaning hard into the technology, customer support. Julia Borson joins us with that story. Julia. Well, David, we've all had that moment of frustration where we press zero, desperate to talk to a real person. And companies are paying to address that customer frustration, spending an estimated $461 billion globally on call centers last year, according to a report linker. And companies are on track to spend more than $58 billion on customer service software by 2030. Now, increasingly, that software is driven by AI and could help cut some of those call center costs. VCs see a massive opportunity here, investing nearly $5 billion in AI customer service companies since 2020, according to PitchBook. At the forefront of these are is Forethought. It's customer service software, which recently integrated chat GPT is used by companies including Marriott, Instacart and Upwork. Forethought says it resolves more than half of customer complaints before they

Speaker 2: get to a human. LLM's generative AI have shown us the ability to kind of respond in human like ways. But what we're doing is combining that with companies deep integrated data and bringing both the human like experience with the power in the engine behind

Speaker 1: Forethought to the customer support world today. Another startup in the space is called Cresta. It drew a $1.6 billion valuation two years ago, and it deploys AI to assist customer service agents and Fortune 500 companies, helping them find answers faster and

Speaker 3: improving handling time by 30%. Our goal is not to replace agents. Our goal is to really make them really better at their jobs and

Speaker 1: then more efficient and more productive. These companies say they are supercharging customer service workers capabilities, but efficiencies mean companies should be able to eventually cut jobs. David.