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Is it time for a chatbot
or digital humans in
your organisation?
M
ore New Zealanders every day
are becoming used to chatbots
or digital employees who serve
customer requests.
The AI Forum of New Zealand’s recent
research report Towards Our Intelligent
Future – An AI Roadmap for New Zealand
says chatbots are increasingly being used
in New Zealand to resolve any queries or
issues.
Support chatbots are often used to
provide assistance to people who cannot
afford the services of professionals such
as a lawyer or counsellor, or do not feel
comfortable sharing their problems with
another person, the report says.
It says digital humans will increasingly
become a key part of everyday customer
M6 | management.co.nz | DEC 2019 / JAN 2020
experiences. The emotional connection is
becoming more important as is the power
of embodied brand in a digital world, AI
Forum of New Zealand executive director
Emma Naji says in a media release.
“Bringing humanness into digital
experiences can result in increased
sales conversions and higher customer
advocacy,” she says.
“However, the digital humans market
is in the early adopter phase. Market
education and gaining traction with
customers can be a challenge for service
providers.”
Some chatbots examples include
Oscar from Air New Zealand, which assists
customers with commonly asked queries;
Rentbot from New Zealand based CitizenAI
related questions through Facebook
Messenger.
Woebot provides cognitive behavioural
therapy lessons and mood tracking while
Clearhead is a mental wellness portal
which uses a chatbot to screen users for
depression and anxiety, recommending
mental health resources and booking
professional help.
New Zealand scale-up Ambit deploys
digital employees on its conversational
AI platform and delivers a solution within
weeks. Ambit’s single biggest challenge
now is future growth, scaling and tackling
the international market.
The report says digital employees
operate through a conversational
interface and reduce the effort and time
for a customer to search a website, make
enquiries on the phone or queue at a store.
Uneeq has a digital human platform
that uses AI to create a natural human-
like interface for machine to human
communication. Its customers and digital
humans include, Vodafone (Kiri), UBank
(Mia), Ministry of Primary Industries (Vai) and
ASB Bank (Josie), UBS and Southern Cross.
Uneeq currently operates in Australasia
and recently expanded to the USA and
Europe. It is investing in research and
development in New Zealand and expects
the development team to double in size
over the next 18 months.
ANZ New Zealand launched its new
digital assistant pilot, Jamie, last year. The
AI technology was developed with New
Zealand company Soul Machines.
Jamie was initially programmed to
answer questions based on the 30 most
frequently searched for online topics. In its
first 100 days Jamie had more than 12,000
conversations with people visiting the site.
The most common question was how to
open a bank account, which Jamie was
asked nearly 1200 times.
Liz Maguire, ANZ’s head of digital
and transformation, says Jamie was able
to answer about 60 percent of customer
queries. To avoid robotic responses to
standard banking questions, considerable
effort was made to optimise Jamie’s friendly
persona. M
See aiforum.org.nz/towards-our-
intelligent-future/
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