Artificial intelligence can help answer calls in a call center, make office work more efficient and potentially help executives make decisions. Startups and businesses around Fort Worth and North Texas are already using the technology.
As AI expands its reach, concerns about job loss, copyright infringement and plagiarism are also growing. But, even though this technology is evolving, the use of AI isn’t exactly new. Take the suggested responses when you type an email or the automated answering services when you call a hotline. A handful of North Texas businesses are working to make the technology better.
Some local startups that have been in the AI industry for years are getting more investments as the technology improves. Others are hopping on the bandwagon.
One Fort Worth business, SmartAction, has been developing robo-answering machines and text chats for 12 years. The roadside assistance company AAA and shoe store DSW use SmartAction’s phone or text bots to direct customers to the right place. In May, SmartAction company raised $38 million in its latest fundraising round to grow its conversational AI platform.
The company has two major investors from private equity: West Coast-based TVC Capital and East Coast-based Staley Capital. The resurgence of popularity and interest in AI helped with fundraising, SmartAction CEO Kyle Johnson said.
“They looked at what we have going on now, and this resurgence of AI as a pretty important thing in the market right now as a great opportunity to double down on their initial investment,” Johnson said. “And so I think that’s fairly significant.”
Johnson said the money will be used to enhance the technology and expand its market team. Over the years, the ability of AI to understand language has improved drastically, he said. The company is working on the speed of response, and making the robot voice sound more realistic.
Fears about AI tools taking over jobs have circulated since the emergence of ChatGPT. One estimate by Goldman Sachs said 300 million jobs could be affected globally. Johnson takes a different stance. He said rather than taking jobs away from humans, AI will make room for employees to focus on more complex tasks.
“If you’re a phone rep, an inbound sales or service agent, there’s parts of your job that you don’t enjoy, just because they’re boring, they’re mundane, they’re repetitive and routine,” he said. “Those are the types of things that we could employ a platform like SmartAction to do.”
Bill Ratliff, the vice president of operations for online travel agency Priceline Partner Solutions, said SmartAction’s AI deflects up to 15,000 calls a month that the company’s agents would have to answer without it, saving money for the company.
“It’s involved in pretty much industry standard,” Ratliff said.
Kay Yut Chen, a professor in the information system and operation management department of the University of Texas-Arlington, sees call centers as a common way AI is already used by businesses. Chen has worked in Silicon Valley for 20 years, and is working with a company to use AI in their business. There’s two other ways businesses will use AI, he said.
AI has been around for decades, Chen said, but it now has more computational power. Before, AI has been used to recognize patterns, like image recognition or in data analytics. Now, AI is more powerful and works similar to a human brain. It can recognize more complicated patterns. ChatGPT-3, for example, has 175 billion parameters, which are the equivalent of neurons in the human brain.
AI tools could help executives make decisions, Chen said. Often, executives will use a data science team to compile a report to help inform a business decision, like how to use money in the budget. Once the data science team compiles a report, that’s where ChatGPT can come in, Chen said.
“The executive can at any time, ask questions about (the data) and summarize that through a language module, like ChatGPT,” Chen said. “So that you make the process of the communication … much more effective.”
The third way AI could be used is simplifying office work and making it more efficient including writing and copyediting. Chen clarified that ChatGPT isn’t creative, it can’t create anything it hasn’t read before.
“Can ChatGPT become a great novelist like John Grisham? I don’t know, maybe tomorrow, or maybe never,” Chen said. “But at the least, if you are John Grisham, and you have a great idea, it will help you to make your work a lot more efficient.”
Jim Boswell, founder and CEO of Flower Mound-based OnPoint Healthcare Partners is using ChatGPT-4 to transcribe clinical notes – summaries of patient visits that have to pass legal, financial and clinical tests.
OnPoint gives physicians a phone with an encrypted app that listens to the conversation and transcribes it into a note. There is an option for a team of physicians to then look over it for accuracy. Boswell thinks the medical industry will be cautious in accepting AI tools like his, but haven’t shunned it completely.
“They’ll use it as a good resource and to help eliminate and drive out administrative processes, like what we’re doing,” Boswell said. “But I think they’ll continue to be cautious until they feel comfortable, the risk of error is very, very low.”
Seth Bodine is a business and economic development reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at seth.bodine@fortworthreport.org and follow on Twitter at @sbodine120.
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