Advances in artificial intelligence combined with the massive adoption of chat channels and messaging apps created from 2017 a strong traction for chatbots. Since then, chatbots have been widely replaced by Digital Assistants, their more sophisticated counterpart. The global intelligent virtual assistant market size is expected to reach USD 45.1 billion by 2027, expanding at a CAGR of 34.0%. The growing use of smart speaker-based technologies for home automation and digitization in the retail sector has led to the implementation of conversational e-commerce is the major driving factor of the market.
These assistants help consumers to find relevant information and perform tasks with actionable advice. Many retail stores have now implemented assistants in their processes, adding a new dimension to their customer engagement, further enhancing the customer shopping experience.
Although customer support has been driving the rise of the market because companies
can drastically improve the efficiency of their customer support and technical support - according to McKinsey, the cost savings is a 10x factor compared with phone support - assistants have started expanding their capabilities and scope to revamp the way digital buyers purchase online. The current pandemic has only accelerated this trend as e-commerce companies have realised that digitalisation was the only viable way through.
In this race to redefine the online buyer’s experience, European companies face many hard challenges especially when competition is called Amazon and AliBaba. .
Botfuel set as its primary goal to be able to democratize and industrialise Shopping Assistants for a vast number of companies of different sizes. Botfuel identified the following challenges as being the most important hurdles for the development of conversational e-commerce in Europe:
Performance: As user expectations grow assistants need to cope with fine-grained classification of a growing number of user intents and increased complexity of interactions.
Usability: Democratization of conversational commerce will only happen if the cost and time to deployment can be decreased significantly which involves providing new solutions in terms of agility, usability and AI training.
Since 2018 and with the help of the H2020 European program, Boftuel has been able to completely redefine the way its technology can be used. The burden for clients of training highly performing AI models has been completely removed, the time of deployment of an assistant has been decreased from several months to a few days and, more importantly, marketing teams (not IT) can now have at their fingertips a powerful tool for improving the buyer’s journey and drive the digitalisation of their retail businesses.
While we are only at the beginning of a major acceleration of our digital lives it is key that European companies can bring highly technological products and AI into the hands of a wide audience of companies of all sizes.
