Self-service and the future balance between tech and people in a call centre.

1. The Balance Between
AI & People

2. Gartner, 5:21 PM
AI Assistants are forecast to handle 85%
of all customer service queries by 2021

3. Gartner, 5:25 PM
By 2021, over 50% of enterprises will
spend more on bots and chatbot
creation than on traditional mobile app
development

4. Welcom Digital, 5:30 PM
75% of all customer credit interaction is
via self-service portals.

5. Steven Goodrich: Head of Technology, Nedbank Wealth
5:30 PM
The Electronic Virtual Assistant handles
80% of the inquiries at just 10% of the
cost of live agents.

6. Decision making and human
fallibility

7. How good are humans at making
decisions on their own?
How good are trained professionals
at making decisions?
2 Case Studies (University of Chicago 2014)

8. Analysed judges ruling on asylum
seekers in the US
 106,071 decisions analysed
 412 judges analysed
 Results
Judges were less likely to approve an asylum applicant:
 Just before lunch
 At the end of the day
 If they had granted the previous applicant asylum
*Daniel Chen, Tobias Moskowitz, Kelly Shue (University of Chicago 2014)

9. *Daniel Chen, Tobias Moskowitz, Kelly Shue (University of Chicago 2014)
Analysed loan officers from banks in
India
 182 officers analysed from multiple banks
 9,174 decisions analysed
 Officers reviewed previous loan applications
 Result:
 Officers were 10% less likely to approve a loan if
they had approved the previous loan

10. 4th Industrial Revolution

11. Changes to Business
Customer Expectation
With customers at the epicenter of the economy, everything is and will continue to shift
towards improving how the customer is served.
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Product Enhancement
Products and services will be given additional capabilities through digital enhancements,
which will increase their value, and through this and other innovations, new technologies
will emerge that cause existing products and items to be more durable. Maintenance will
also be altered, by utilising data and analytics.
Collaborative innovation
Connectivity and innovation enable and require collaboration and partnership, much like
open source technologies such as Python enabled access and collaboration to analytical
solutions.

12. Previous industrial revolutions have shown us that if companies and
industries don’t adapt with new technology, they struggle. Worse, they
fail.
Change is inevitable, not optional!
Automation, machine learning, mobile computing and artificial intelligence
— these are no longer futuristic concepts, they are our reality.
To many people, these changes are scary.
Adoption is not voluntary!

13. The South African Climate

14. Bank union plans 'total shutdown of industry' over job losses – Times Live 6 August 2019
Hundreds of jobs at risk as Absa revamps retail bank: The shake-up comes as South African
lenders contend with slow economic growth and a consumer base battered by tax hikes and
rising fuel and utility expenses. A stubborn unemployment rate of about 27 percent and
declining business confidence is also curbing demand for loans, forcing banks to bring their
costs down. – Fin24 7 May 2019
Fear or Optimism?
"The state of retrenchments has everything to do with the fact that the economy is not
growing particularly well. That is probably even more an important factor than the 4th
Industrial revolution,“
"There is no question that the high level of industrial action in the South African economy
is promoting the use of technology as an alternative“ - Director and Chief Economist at
Econometrix, Dr Azar Jammine

15. Augmented Artificial
Intelligence

16. Humans and computers play differently, each has strengths and
weaknesses
Learnings from 22 years of AI
Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov in chess match.
On May 11, 1997, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov resigns after 19 moves in a game
against Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer developed by scientists at IBM. This was
the sixth and final game of their match, during which Kasparov lost two games to one,
with three draws.
Computers prefer to retreat, but they can store massive amounts of data
and are unbiased in their decision-making
Humans can be more stubborn, but also can read their opponent’s
weaknesses, evaluate complex patterns, and make creative and
strategic decisions to win.
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17. Learnings from 22 years of AI
The creators of artificial chess-
playing machines, Alex Bernstein,
an employee at IBM,
acknowledged that the best chess
player is actually a team of both
human and machine.

18. Theory
Utilising AI in an automated way, replacing humans, is
irresponsible and morally wrong
“Augmented intelligence (AI), also referred to as intelligence
augmentation (IA) and cognitive augmentation, is a complement—not a
replacement—to human intelligence. It’s about helping humans become
faster and smarter at the tasks they’re performing.”
“Augmented intelligence refers to the result of combining human and
machine intelligence…” - Ben Dickson (software engineer and the
founder of TechTalks)
Augmented Intelligence doesn’t oppose Artificial
Intelligence, it is a way of utilising AI in a responsible
way

19. Yale University’s Institute for Network Science, Hirokazu Shirado and Nicholas Christakis
Case Study
What would happen if we looked at artificial intelligence (AI) as a
companion instead of a replacement for people?
Experiment: online game that required groups of people to
coordinate their actions for a collective goal. The human players
also interacted with anonymous bots that were programmed with
three levels of behavioral randomness -- meaning the AI bots
sometimes deliberately made mistakes. In addition, sometimes the
bots were placed in different parts of the social network. More than
4,000 people participated in the experiment.

20. Case Study
Result: Not only did the inclusion of bots aid the overall
performance of human players, it proved particularly beneficial
when tasks became more difficult, the study found. The bots
accelerated the median time for groups to solve problems by
55.6%.
People whose performance improved when working with the
bots subsequently influenced other human players to raise their
game.
Yale University’s Institute for Network Science, Hirokazu Shirado and Nicholas Christakis
What would happen if we looked at artificial intelligence (AI) as a
companion instead of a replacement for people?

21. Why Augmented Intelligence?
Unintended Outcomes
AI is imperfect, like humans, and errors or unintended outcomes can be due
to: bad data, bad domain models and biases, incorrect interpretations of
outcomes etc.
The claim is not that AI will be perfect, the claim is that AI will be better than
humans, but human supervision is still required.
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Empathy and trust
Larry Greenemeier (Scientific American): “We make decisions not just based
on rational thinking but also values, ethics, morality, empathy and a sense of
right and wrong — all things that machines don’t inherently have.”
So, we need humans to add that personal, social, or emotional touch to the
decisions.
Do you trust AI system more when you know that a human is supervising it?

22. Why Augmented Intelligence?
Improve Human Behaviour
Case Study
Augmented AI can help humans to help themselves.
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23. “The more organizations implement AI, the more jobs it creates and these jobs will fall into
two categories — jobs directly related to implementing and developing AI within the
organization and jobs created by the opportunities for scale that AI provides.
Overall, AI will not eliminate jobs. By 2020, AI will become a net-positive job motivator,
eliminating 1.8 million jobs while creating 2.3 million jobs.”
Laurence Goasduff - Gartner
Job Creator
“People can be better at their jobs with the technology of today—and the technology that is
yet to come—rather than fearing that their human skills will be devalued.”
Brad Keywell - Co-founder and CEO, Uptake

24. “We should be reminded that when the ATM was introduced 40 years ago, there were fears that it
would make tellers redundant. Today, we have hundreds more tellers and thousands more ATMs as
well as many staff working in ancillary services around the ATM ecosystem.”
Nedbank notes that it recognises that to create great client experiences and achieve its aspirations to
be “digital first and first in digital”, its digital transformation journey must be both a people and
technology journey, where the one will not succeed without the other.
Nedbank: “We must never forget that technology is driven by people, and that transformation is really
a technology and people journey at the same time.”
Job Creator
Article: Nedbank to reskill employees as tech disrupts jobs ITWeb Admire Moyo 18 October 2019

25. Research conducted by the World Economic Forum: 65% of children who are entering primary school
this year, are faced with the prospect of being employed in jobs that do not exist today.
As the demand for new skills evolves, education needs to adopt, otherwise educational institutions
will fail society.
Within South Africa and Africa, education systems are not sufficiently responsive to the technology
demand, and in order to achieve the future we are capable off, we need to address the gap that exists
between what people are trained in and what is needed.
“It simply cannot be business as usual, especially when that business is not addressing the needs of
the country”
Requires Preparation
Credit: Professor Mpine Makoe of Unisa & Chairperson Commonwealth of Learning

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