Conversational AI is the new find of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

It is a form of Artificial Intelligence that allows all stakeholders to communicate with an enterprise in a secure and personalized way.

For users it allows fast interaction with an organisations’ touchpoints using their own words and terminology. For enterprises it offers a way to build a closer connection with customers through personalized interaction and receive large amounts of vital business information.

There has been an exponential surge in the demand for conversational AI platforms that are capable of truly understanding the customers’ needs and demands.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human.

In a recent report that explores the conversational AI applications and looks at development technology from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, alongside Artificial Solutions, it discusses how the tremendous growth in the Intelligent Assistant market can be attributed to automated customer support services.

In order to achieve this, enterprises need to ensure that conversational platforms can understand the context and the sentiment behind the conversation. That the conversational AI solution can seamlessly integrate with back-end data and third-party databases to enable deeper personalization. It also needs to be capable of creating detailed analysis of the conversations in real-time to deliver actionable insights to the business.

Understanding the conversational data generated by intelligent digital assistants will reap huge rewards for enterprises. This is because when people communicate in a natural, conversational way, they reveal more than just the words they’re saying.

Their individual preferences, views, opinions, feelings, inclinations and more are all part of the conversation. But conversational data must be interpreted within its proper context before it can be turned into actionable information.

Gartner also lists conversational platforms as one of its Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018.

For enterprises conversational AI offers not just a chance to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketspace, but the opportunity to garner valuable data on the voice of the customer. To understand what they are looking for today and in the future; to engage with them on any device or service they use; and to deliver a personalized service not just to high value customers, but to every customer.

With Gartner predicting that “Conversational AI-first” will supersede cloud-first, mobile first” as the most important high-level imperative for the next ten years there is no doubt that many enterprises in the next twelve months will be deploying AI conversational platforms.