AI WEEK 2024: taking stock

Back from the fifth AI Week in Rimini, Italy's largest artificial intelligence event, we are reflecting on the ideas we explored and presented. During two intensive days of workshops and meetings, we experienced the technology's many possibilities first-hand.

It was truly moving to describe how our customer service has navigated technological and behavioural eras over 40 years, share our experience and expectations, present excellent results and reassure an audience uncertain about this powerful technology's impact by demonstrating how fundamentally AI depends on human training.

Thanks to our technology partner Ellysse, we shared our experience during a dedicated workshop with a large, interested audience. We described a particular customer support case in which conversational AI was essential to understanding users' requests correctly and querying systems and data to provide immediate, personalised responses.

We discussed how AI has transformed our processes, making us more competitive in efficiently handling large and highly variable volumes of requests around the clock. We also discussed how this technology has helped us develop internal skills. At an operational level, it gives customer service staff more time for complex, higher-value activities. At a technical and professional level, it creates new roles: the Conversation Designer, who designs the user's experience of a conversation with a bot; the Copywriter and Prompt Designer, who design conversation content; and the Bot Trainer, who trains the bot to recognise conversations with increasing accuracy.

We are confident that next year we will be able to share further examples showing how AI can be applied effectively and ethically in customer support.