2018 has been the year of artificial intelligence (AI). What was until recently just an emerging trend, has now established itself to the extent that it is already hard to imagine a work life without AI-driven applications. Chatbots—one of the more popular applications of AI —have become ubiquitous, and every SaaS company has jumped on to the AI and machine learning (ML) bandwagon.

Global AI spending is exploding. According to current trends, it will go from $2 billion in 2018 to over $7.3 billion in just the next four years1. Many publications have proclaimed it as the “next big thing” in the business world. They seem to believe that it’s poised to change the way companies interact with customers altogether. They’re less clear, though, on how businesses can actually use it. But today, one of the best uses of AI is customer service.

It would be easy to think the benefits of AI are massively overhyped. Every day there’s another article extolling the future of robots answering customer questions and reducing the need for customer support representatives. But you could be forgiven for thinking this is all hype. So far, results have been less than impressive.

AI assistants are capable of quite a bit more than their living room responsibilities, although we very much appreciate that they can order us pizza and play Spotify. In the workplace, they’re helping to fill the gaps that commonly plague customer service: miscommunications, uninformed support agents, and meeting customers’ expectations. As much as machine learning has been touted for providing better customer experiences, it can help drive better customer engagement as well.

Freshworks a global leader in customer engagement software, has announced the launch of “Freddy”, an “Omnibot” AI engine that enhances the sales, support and marketing capabilities for businesses of all sizes.

As customers and companies become more familiar and comfortable with artificial intelligence, the conversations around it have become less “pie in the sky” and more along the lines of “oh, that’s how it can be used”. The speculations into how we might work alongside our robot coworkers and the potential of machine learning won’t end anytime soon, but there’s a lot to be said about practical applications of AI technology.

It’s no secret that the customer experience (CX) has risen to the top priorities of most companies today. Businesses are putting a lot of effort into ensuring that their customers not only enjoy their experience with a company or service, but that they want to share that experience with others.