Can Artificial Intelligence be sincere? The ‘A’ in AI probably holds a clue.
It’s not an entirely philosophical question because the BBC is back in its own news, this time by announcing a plan to use AI to handle viewers’ complaints. The £40m Serco contract is raising questions and eyebrows but is there anything fundamentally wrong with using AI for complaints?
At one level, complaints handling is transactional, and AI offers a great way of dealing with correspondence particularly where there’s a lot of it. However, if you anticipate receiving so many complaints that you need AI to process them, what does that say about the quality of the service you are providing? And if a high volume of complaints has simply become a fact of life, perhaps an organisational success measure would be getting them down to a level where you no longer need the technology to handle them for you? Now there’s a trend reversal we don’t often see.
There are other public services providers whose numbers would probably justify the investment in AI for mass processing of complaints – I’m thinking utilities and railways – but what about critical emergency services or criminal conviction review bodies? Would we want police complaints to be handled by AI for example?
