Transcom Chats with Aron Bodin. - AI series

Introduction.

‘Transcom Chats’ is a series of interviews with Transcom staff on things and topics we’re passionate about. The aim is to bring forward, talk to, and highlight the people that make Transcom the brand you know and love. This time with a slight twist. We’re starting an AI series in which we will discuss anything and everything to do with AI and CX.

Today, we’re joined by our head of digital products and AI, Aron Bodin. He’ll be talking about the future of AI, the caveats about it, and the excitement connected with it, that just doesn’t seem to die down.

Interview.

• What are the biggest trends for AI in CX right now?

We see things that're already out on markets, with various qualities. I must add, in terms of translating between different languages both real time and post translations, to be able to make use of your most efficient workforce and where we have capacity. The other thing will change things dramatically over the coming few years are the copilot solutions. We're starting to see where you basically use generative AI to help out our workforce in proceeding according to protocol for the various tasks we're given. 

I also see that as these copilot procedures mature over time we’ll be able to turn more and more of those into autopilot procedures, removing a lot of the tedious and mundane work from our day or our agents or entire workforce day to day life. And it's just exciting to see what's coming our way and trying to start identifying the pitfalls and mitigate those, because I think it's more around having a sober approach to what AI can and should and can't and shouldn't assist us in when providing CX services.

• What are the most important considerations when automating processes?

The nuances of these solutions. They come in, they solve different tasks depending on the LLM, depending on the vendor you choose. Are you going for your own, how you tune it, how you tweak it. And I think the most important thing is around our privacy and sensibility in all of this, because at the end of the day, you might be giving others a lot of data you did not have in mind sharing from the beginning, where we will see different solutions for different regions of the world.

As I mentioned earlier, you know, computing isn't for free. It comes at the expense of euros or dollars. It comes at the expense of CO2 footprint and it comes at the expense of, you know, not adding more complications to processes because sometimes, you know, the first thing you should look at is whether or not we should be doing this at all.

• Can you tell us about a case where we used AI to improve a process?

I think anyone who's been in this industry knows that it takes a lot of time and a lot of attention to understand the overall sentiment  of a conversation. It typically requires a human. I think we've come a long way now in terms of understanding not just which words we use where, but also tonality and the overall sentiment of a conversation. So I think that's a great, great example of where we get help for a quite tedious and sometimes also mundane task.

• What excites you the most about AI right now?

I think on a high note,  what's close to my heart and what we are super good at here at Transcom is obviously translation and being able to communicate with people in their mother tongue across geographies with the assistance of AI. So from a professional standpoint, being able to capture essence, a tonality of people that are like me, not very good in English, for instance, have helped out a lot.

Plus the fact that you get help with summarizing conversations and content that's gone on in the past while you are offline and truly empowering you with some sort of close to human-like assistant. And isn't that the end game that we should all feel like we have an assistant? That's when we succeeded in life. So yeah, I kind of like that. And even more that it's not a human.