In Conversation With, Raghavendra Swamy, Managing Director, Concentrix Corporation on NLP Chatbots
Raghavendra is a senior IT business leader with global experience over 3 decades – in Digital transformation, strategy and technology consulting, IT services, Global Delivery, and Practice/Offering management.
Currently, as a Managing Director at Concentrix, Raghavendra has been defining and executing transformation journeys for key clients in Healthcare, Auto and Energy, and Utilities sectors.
He has been spearheading the Cloud transformation and Application Modernization programs that are positioning Concentrix as a Global Leader in Digital Customer Experience.
Q- What is NLP (Natural Language Processing) Chatbot and how does it work?
Everybody is familiar with Chatbots. Basically, chatbots are software programs that simulate a human conversation by answering simple and generic questions a user might have. The software will have a ready list of questions and answers mapped in the backend.
The advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) brought new life into these chatbots. Natural Language Processing (NLP), a part of AI, tries to understand the intent or semantics of the question. It brings more “human intelligence” into the scene.
Just to get our leave balance, a user can ask the chatbot in multiple ways, “How many leaves do I have?”, “Can you let me know my leave balance”, “My pending leaves, please?”, “Do I have any leaves left?” and so forth. With the usage of NLP, we can make chatbots, really “understand” or “decode” the intent and respond appropriately.
The language models are fundamental components of an NLP engine, and they are trained using initial set of data. Thanks to the advances in AI technology, the software learns its language decoding skills over a period as more users start interacting with it.
It becomes more intelligent with improved understanding capability, just like a child learning from interactions with family and friends.
Q- How can NLP Chatbots leverage for better employee experience?
Post-pandemic period, hybrid work is becoming a norm and there is also so much happening in workspace with advanced frameworks for globalization, diversity, equity, etc. The HR systems are becoming more complex and bigger mazes for employees to navigate through.
In this context, NLP Chatbots can help hyper-personalization, a key element of employee experience. They can act as personal assistants to employees answering most of their HR questions 24×7 on their desktop or mobile.
In fact, NLP Chatbots can play a key role in the entire employee life cycle starting from talent attraction, onboarding, development, and employee retention. They can provide human-like interactions at all the key touchpoints ensuring that employees always feel supported and well-cared for.
The rich database of employee conversations through chatbots could also act as a true representation of the real pulse or voice of the employees. The enterprises could use again AI/ML technologies to process this and identify top priorities that they should focus on for a richer employee experience.
Q- ChatGPT proves AI is finally mainstream, what are the Pros and Cons of Generative AI in modern enterprises?
Yes, ChatGPT is a remarkable revolution in the field of Natural Language Processing. It possesses a vast knowledge database and demonstrates an exceptional ability to engage in meaningful conversations with a proper sense of emotion and tone.
The enterprises are already realizing the immense potential of AI and Chatbot has been a great accelerator for them in terms of agility, productivity, and growth. It is already helping them create better website content for branding, develop content in other languages and deliver well-crafted internal messages to employees.
The areas which were earlier experimented with AI tools, like Customer service management, digital personal assistants, recruitment and talent sourcing, and financial analysis can all be now handled in a much more robust way with ChatGPT.
As we saw with a recent upgrade to GPT-4, the ChatGPT can now play a role of a software developer to build code snippets and stand-up simple web pages.
It can also be used in critical areas like cost-effective medical diagnosis in healthcare or detecting security vulnerabilities in your enterprise network. Given this growing list of Pros for ChatGPT, no wonder a Forbes survey came up with the data that almost all (97%) business owners believe ChatGPT will help their business.
However, as technology is fast evolving, there are some growing concerns and calls for the responsible use of ChatGPT. Since ChatGPT is based on internet data, there is always a fear of misinformation or biased response.
While ChatGPT could decode the emotion/tone of the conversation, it could still miss the insights, and fail to exhibit empathy or comprehend sensitivity. The enterprises are also worried about their IP getting leaked and potentially getting used for generative AI.
Q-How do you see Impact of ChatGPT on the job market and which jobs will be eliminated and created because of it?
As I mentioned earlier, the latest developments in ChatGPT could easily handle a good amount of customer service jobs, basic coding, and website creation tasks and hence there is a growing apprehension that these white-collar jobs with lower barriers of entry will be eliminated in the industry.
Jobs related to content creation and management like technical writers, Journalism, and Advertising are also going to be impacted. Similarly, jobs in the legal industry such as paralegals and legal assistants who deal with large information will be impacted.
As with any technology revolution, there are new jobs that will be created. We are already seeing increased demand for AI and ML engineers and Data scientists. We are seeing these new streams emerge as major disciplines in Universities to feed into the demand.
We will also have jobs created to bring human aspects into content, like curating for ethics and policy, auditing for AI bias, and training the data systems for better handling of prompts. A future Chief AI Officer would be responsible to drive and put in place guardrails for AI use in the enterprise.
Q-What are the Challenges and limitations of ChatGPT?
At the end of the day, ChatGPT is also limited by its knowledge base and trained models. It can never be omniscient. We already spoke about the limitations of ChatGPT, like biased data and limited emotional intelligence which need human intervention.
There is also a big challenge for enterprises to safeguard their IP as employees could potentially use the Company’s IP in ChatGPT prompts. This could result in proprietary information becoming accessible for Generative AI learning and for public use impacting the company’s business operations.
There is also a potential risk of over-reliance on ChatGPT as a source of absolute truth by users. This can seriously impact critical thinking and problem-solving skills that are essential for success in the real world.
Q- Any concluding remarks?
Similar to previous technology revolutions where computers replaced manual processes or the internet transformed various industries, we are at another big inflection point in the realm of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
It is inevitable and will bring a sea change in the immediate future in all our lives. Enterprises that make substantial investments and embrace these advancements swiftly will be the ones to thrive. Human intelligence and imagination are ever-expanding, and this technology will serve as a catalyst to propel it to the next orbit.
Thank You, Raghavendra!
