The chatter around AI certainly hasn’t slowed down. Brands all over the world are looking for ways to include AI in their day-to-day and in customer interactions. Generative AI and conversational AI have specifically dominated the conversation for B2C interactions – but what are they exactly? And how do brands know when to use which?  

In this blog we’ll explore each technology, their differences, benefits, and limitations, and uncover when and how brands can use them to create richer experiences for their customers and yield better results.  

Conversational AI is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can mimic natural human language.  It aims to provide a more human experience to users through chatbots or voice bots that can not only understand human speech and language but can also produce natural responses.

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can produce creative and new content. Its aim is to create unique and realistic content that does not yet exist, based on what has been learned from different sources of training data.

There are many applications today for both conversational AI and generative AI for businesses. While both use natural language processing to output human-sounding replies, conversational AI is more often deployed in customer service and chatbots, while generative AI creates new and unique content.

Summary of how businesses can use both types of AI:  

Generative AI can be incredibly helpful to create conceptual art or generate content ideas for pre-planning. However, the output is often derivative, generic, and biased since it is trained on existing work. Worse, it might even produce wildly inaccurate replies or content due to ‘AI hallucination’ as it attempts to create plausible-sounding falsehoods within the generated content. 

With its smaller and more focused dataset, conversational AI is better equipped to handle specific customer requests. For example, a telco customer seeking help for a technical issue would be better served with a telco chatbot that already has a pool of solutions and answers specific to the problem from that specific telco. Generative AI would pull information from multiple training data sources leading to mismatched or confused answers.  

The technology behind generative AI is still relatively new, so brands looking to utilize AI within their businesses would be better off with more mature and proven conversational commerce solutions to offer customers the best experiences. 

Many APAC brands and organizations today already utilize conversational commerce solutions powered by conversational AI and the cloud, using a Conversational Experience Platform to build end-to-end automated journeys.

It’s no surprise to see growing adoption of conversational commerce among businesses and even government organizations since conversational commerce can reduce customer service costs by upwards of 30%.

Some use cases for conversational commerce include:

In a recent collaboration with Masters of Code, a floral subscription company, Bloomsy Box, was able to launch a Mother’s Day campaign with a generative AI eCommerce chatbot that created personalized greeting cards to the winners of its daily floral bouquet giveaway.

By utilizing GPT-powered conversational experiences, brands can integrate an intelligent AI assistant without having to know a single line of code while customers receive unique contest experiences tailormade for them.

Integrating an omnichannel CPaaS solution is never easy but fortunately, there are many experienced, well-established technology solution vendors that can help you get started with conversational commerce. 

Infobip offers a wide range of solutions to aid and support in conversational transformation: 

Infobip continues to invest in automation, frameworks around ChatGPT, and enhanced self-serve and security features. This is ideal for international customers seeking an experienced conversational commerce partner with a strong global presence.