Conversation-as-a-Service: knowledge economies of scale

Conversation-as-a-Service enables an individual to benefit from contextual knowledge expressed directly to them. The individual controls the dialogue through the options they select, which can be enriched, if needed, through contextual explanations in the form of further dialogue, pictures and videos. This revolution in interaction is slowly gaining momentum, which will profoundly change both customer and employee experiences.  

The sheer volume of information available today has dramatically altered productivity and performance. Just in the area of regulatory and statutory content, it is regarded by many as overwhelming. The cost of coordination to search, organise and synthesise information in a contextual form to make informed decisions is now much higher that most organisations realise. The rise (and rise) of coordination costs has singly been attributed to why productivity remains stagnant, even though technology continues to advance rapidly.  

Chatbots provides the means for empowering everyone, anywhere with better understanding to help them make more informed, contextual decisions. Though much focus has been about the generalist chatbots like Cortana, Alexa, Duplex, Siri and Bixby, a significant paradigm shift will be through specialist chatbots.

Each specialist chatbot will contain synthesised knowledge, enabling the individual to cut through information overload quickly and effectively to reach the best-fit outcome.  Specialist chatbots can be made available everywhere for everyone through omnichannel deployment.

The impact of word-of-mouth through social networks is well established. Now, word-of-mouth is about to be amplified through conversation-as-a-service as individuals and chatbots learn to co-exist. This step change will be reached far more quickly than most people realise as online communities of practice become knowledge factories for creating, sharing, measuring and evolving chatbots. This is a shift where intangibles become tangibles in the form of working, measurable knowledge assets, which may not be owned by the traditional organisations in the public and private sectors.

Understanding how and why chatbot dialogue works will empower these communities of practice to enrich and extend coordinated, consistent knowledge to reach the right people with the right content in the right context. The shift towards knowledge economies of scale generates exponentially an impact on products, services, research, development and innovation. It is so profound that change cycles will become much shorter and shorter, leading to a growth of jobs on a global scale contrary to the current views related to artificial intelligence.

Conversation-as-a-Service uses dialogue data as a scientific means to understand and measure the impact and socioeconomic ramifications, of both good and bad dialogue. A starting point has been to count the number and type of dialogue-steps to reach the endpoint of the conversation. There is an appealing power and simplicity to this approach, as it provides insights into the granularity of choices, pathways and outcomes. By looking at the impact, as well as the volume of these dialogue strings, these metrics accurately provide the efficiency and effectiveness of decisions at the individual and aggregated level.  

The critical driver is the brand of the specialist chatbot as the individual must trust and believe that the chatbot really knows the contextual knowledge needed. The flexibility of chatbots as working, measurable knowledge assets potentially benefits every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more. The decision science behind chatbots enables communities of practice to enrich the chatbot knowledge, but more importantly to continually expand the knowledge at the edge on a global scale. After all, knowledge is an infinite resource.  

We are at a tipping point from shifting from information overload to knowledge economies of scale leading to a revolution in interaction. Thus, the knowledge economy is now close to reaching adulthood, since its ‘inception’ when Peter Drucker published his book In the Age of Discontinuity, 1969.