Lessons Learned From Improving Experience With Gen AI

From chatbots to personalized search and data analysis, generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI) has incredible power to touch and improve all aspects of the customer and employee experience.

However, not all solutions are created equally, and establishing a platform that boosts the total experience requires strategic thinking.

We’ve been helping clients adopt and adjust their Generative AI strategies for over a year, and experience is always an area with the biggest transformation.

Ready to use Gen AI to take your experience to the next level? Here are three ways to do it.

Use Custom-Fit AI Tools to Tailor Experiences

One AI tool can’t rule them all. Instead, great experiences come from multiple AI tools curated to create tailored experiences.

While it would be great to have one Large Language Model (LLM) that controls everything individuals, teams, and organizations need, the reality is that the technology isn’t there yet. LLMs require context to provide efficient, accurate results; right now, that context works best in smaller doses. Trying to feed too much data and too many use cases into an AI tool can lead to inaccuracies and be an ineffective way of addressing intended use cases.

Instead, focus on specific, tailored experiences using multiple AI tools. These bots allow you to curate the experience to exactly what your customers and employees need while still controlling the data input and context. For example, customer service representatives could benefit from a bot that helps them find answers to customer questions. The marketing team can use a different micro-bot to create content, and finance can use another to analyze budgets. Instead of trying to tailor a single LLM for all your Gen AI experiences, teams can use small bots that give them exactly what they need and are more accurate and usable.

You might be wondering, how do I create a great customer or employee experience with various AI tools? This is where you can create an AI tool that finds the right tools for each task. The goal is to create a Gen AI experience as smooth as a Google search — something employees and customers do daily. Imagine a bot that quickly connects users with the right micro-bot for their tasks. Instead of searching through each bot individually, users should be able to easily find the micro-bot they need based on the information they want to acquire. Essentially, one bot helps people know where to go for info and points them to the specific micro-bot for their task.

Add to Search, Don’t Replace It

The biggest current issue with Gen AI is inaccuracy. We’ve all heard the stories of chatbots that share incorrect information or hallucinate, and that’s not the kind of headline you want your AI to make.

Because AI accuracy still isn’t perfect 100% of the time, it can't be considered the only source of truth. Organizations should augment AI search results (prompt responses) with search result links and related topics to help users move in the right direction.

Picture this: An employee asks AI for guidance about a complex HR question and wants to know more about his benefits. AI provides a single answer, which ends up taking the user down the wrong path, leading him to information about benefits for which he isn’t eligible.

Having a single answer to a complex problem can lead users to incorrect or irrelevant information. Research from Boston Consulting Group shows that people over-rely on a single answer, especially the more comfortable and trained they are with AI. A chatbot or other AI tool doesn’t know what angle you want to take in your search or what tangent will interest you — that’s where supplementing with other resources comes in.

Instead, an AI tool that augments search with generative answers could give the user a simple answer to his HR question and then include links to related content, such as benefits webinars, FAQ pages, and a benefits calculator. That way, the user can customize the experience and not rely on AI to distill information for him. It’s the best of both worlds: AI helps simplify information quickly while providing humans resources to make their own decisions without getting bogged down in the search. It allows users to see the Gen AI response and dive into links and documents to find more information if needed. Providing links is crucial and allows users to see the receipts of how the LLM generated the answers to questions and check for inaccuracies.

Buy, Don’t Build (Most of the Time)

It’s clear that Generative AI is the future, and many companies are excited to jump in and start building the perfect tool for their needs. We’ve learned — through sometimes painful experiences — that the big players in the AI space are often right behind you in development and can work more efficiently and quickly with their AI experience and resources. Rightpoint spent months designing an AI tool for language translation, only to have a major LLM release the same feature soon after.

Organizations may want to invest time and money in building their own UI or AI features. However, building an interface from scratch takes time and effort (plus expertise) and will likely result in your organization playing catch-up the entire time. This is especially true in the early days of adopting AI, which often comes with a steep learning curve. Don't waste time building the perfect tool when solid options are already available.

Instead of pouring your effort into custom experiences, stay current on platform updates and find ways to extend your tool instead of building something new from scratch. Focus on the data integrations and knowledge-context those tools have access to and identify optimized ways to configure your tools rather than customize them. You can still brand the interface of an existing platform to match your look and feel. As you stay updated on your platform’s evolving roadmap, you can find unique opportunities for extension.

The only time to fully customize your tool is if an extremely unique use case will benefit you — and that will become more obvious as the technology continues to evolve. Ensure the value proposition makes sense and is unique to your company’s needs and focus on the most crucial elements of the AI tool.

The future of experience is driven by AI. To transform the customer and employee experience, lean into the power of generative AI, but do it strategically with smaller, augmented solutions that can be customized and evolve with time.