Ethical

Artificial Intelligence (AI) touches virtually every industry, but it’s become a foundational element in today’s customer experience (CX) strategies. Contact centers, customer support platforms, and digital engagement tools rely on AI to enable faster response times, more personalized interactions, and to uncover valuable insights from massive amounts of customer data. Conversational AI, real-time voice analytics, and intelligent routing are just a few of the innovations transforming how organizations connect with their customers.

While there are plenty of benefits to AI, one thing remains true: AI will never be entirely free from bias. This is because AI is only as accurate as the data it was trained on – which is ultimately created, trained, and maintained by humans – humans, who unconsciously bring their own assumptions and blind spots into the AI systems they build.

This doesn’t mean AI can’t be trustworthy, responsible or fair. It simply means organizations need to implement strong guardrails and standards for monitoring and refining AI models to ensure fairness, inclusion, and neutrality. Mitigating bias is essential across industries, but is especially important in CX – not just for stronger performance and efficiency, but to build and maintain long-term customer trust and regulatory compliance.

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Reggie Scales

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President and Head of Applications for Vonage.

Reducing AI bias improves agent performance and efficiency

When using AI to automate customer service tasks or assist human agents, even the smallest of biases in data can lead to low-quality experiences. For example, speech recognition tools might struggle to understand different accents and dialects, leading to frustrating customer experiences. Sentiment analysis might misread emotional cues, resulting in inaccurate responses or escalation to the wrong agent. Intelligent routing workflows can unintentionally prioritize certain customer profiles over others if historical training data skews unfairly.

These inconsistencies don’t just impact customers, but agents as well. Human agents may have to step in more often to correct AI mishaps or hallucinations, increasing their cognitive workload and decreasing employee morale, reducing the overall efficiency that AI-powered tools promise to deliver. Additionally, it decreases trust in the technology for agents, potentially leading to negative perceptions of how AI is used and how it is impacting their work.

To address these challenges, organizations need to start by using diverse datasets to train AI models and ensure they can adapt to evolving inputs. From there, constantly auditing and refining data allows organizations to weed out biases before they creep into outputs, ensuring more fair, accurate results. Additionally, monitoring real-time customer feedback across multiple channels gives organizations a strong idea of where customer frustrations are occurring and allows them to take another look at the data feeding those interactions.

Ethical AI builds customer loyalty and supports compliance

Today’s consumers are more tech-savvy and privacy-conscious than ever. While recent data shows that more than half of consumers say AI alone doesn’t negatively impact their trust, how customer data is used with it can.

Organizations can address these concerns by adopting privacy-first principles to maintain trust and show commitment to responsible AI practices. Taking steps like encrypting sensitive data, restricting access through strong identity controls, and anonymizing customer data used in AI training models are great examples of a privacy-first approach. Transcripts, voice recordings, and behavior patterns must be handled with care – not just to build trust, but to comply with privacy laws like the GDPR, CCPA and the EU AI Act.

Transparency with consumers is equally as important, especially as it relates to how and what data is collected. Giving customers control over their data, ensuring transparent AI governance, clearly disclosing the use of AI chatbots or tools, and providing seamless escalation to human agents when needed, fosters a sense of trust among customers. Organizations that share how AI is used and decisions are made are likely to earn long-term customer loyalty.

What is easily forgotten is that there is an entire industry segment called Workforce Engagement Management and part of that is coaching agents and getting customer feedback. The ethics of best practice are already in place. Whether it is a virtual agent or a real agent, the principle of improving and compliance still applies. What AI can bring is that the time between the potential error and the review of that mistake can be almost instantaneous. We can also use AI to check AI and compare the ethical answer with the actual answer. Just make your AI agents trainable as you would with your human agents.

Responsible AI enables responsible innovation

AI-driven innovation seems to move at the speed of light, but innovation doesn’t have to come at the expense of responsibility. Unsurprisingly, the most forward-thinking organizations are those that embed ethical principles into the innovation process from day one. Achieving this means fostering open collaboration between developers, data scientists, business stakeholders, and IT teams to ensure that both innovation and security are balanced.

Establishing a clear AI governance framework or roadmap helps align stakeholders around a clear vision for ethical AI. When standards and processes are both clearly defined and consistently applied, organizations can scale innovation more responsibly and confidently.

Bias in AI is a complex issue that nearly every organization has or will face – but it’s not an unsolvable one. Feeding diverse datasets into AI training models and then consistently auditing the data helps to mitigate bias. While truly bias-free AI may be difficult to achieve, understanding the challenges and continuously working to limit bias leads to stronger customer loyalty, enhanced compliance, and more opportunities to innovate at scale.

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This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro’s Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

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