A year into the coronavirus pandemic that has taken hold of the whole world, the effects are being felt deeply in all areas of life. The outbreak has particularly paved the way for a breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI), which has been at the top of technology trends for a long time.

Amid the digitalization wave that has intensified with the outbreak, companies dealing with the AI listed their important projects one after another, led by medical devices, tracking technologies, ventures to reduce the devastating impact of the pandemic, and of course vaccines.

AI played a crucial role in almost all of these developments, but it contributes to business processes possibly the most.

AI to the rescue

AI has come to the aid of companies that wanted to increase efficiency by keeping their costs under control. CBOT, which specializes in AI technologies in Turkey, draws attention to the fact that AI investments in the business processes of companies increased significantly last year, noting that companies that want to manage the changing customer experience particularly focused on virtual assistant investments.

"With the pandemic effect in our country, we can say that the chatbot investments of institutions have increased significantly and the end-users are more interested in chatbots," CBOT Founder and CEO Mete Aktaş said.

The outbreak has served as a catalyst for digital transformation that ensures business continuity and flexibility, he noted.

"The necessity to meet the changing needs of the consumer quickly and efficiently increased the need for automation. Artificial intelligence came to the rescue for the companies seeking to boost efficiency by keeping their costs under control. At the point we have reached today, there has been an increase of up to 400% in the number of questions coming from digital channels to customer service. Today, 80% of these questions can be answered with artificial intelligence with the help of our technology," he added.

Virtual assistants

Aktaş suggested that more consumers have been adopting AI-based virtual assistants.

He noted that consumers demanded new and safe ways to interact with companies, and companies offered ways to make this possible.

Noting that staying at home in this process accelerated the transition to automation in providing customer support with digital channels for many different sectors, especially banks, insurers, public institutions and telecom operators, Aktaş stressed that those who are looking for help with an invoice, wondering where their order is, or want to make a transaction have started to prefer to talk to AI-supported virtual assistants due to the speed and personalized experience.

"The artificial intelligence interaction rate, which was 20% a few years ago, reached 60% with the preference of chatbots and virtual assistants by people in the last year," he further noted.

"At CBOT, we predicted that virtual assistants would be an indispensable part of our lives in the future. We now clearly see that we were not mistaken in this prediction. In 2020, conversations over CBOT chatbots alone grew 15-fold to over 400 million. When we look at the year 2020 in CBOT chatbots, we witnessed a four-fold increase in banking and a two-fold increase in e-commerce with the effect of the pandemic."

Right focus solves problem

Another issue that stood out in Aktaş’s assessment was how accurate the companies’ investment decisions, taken at the beginning of the pandemic, in AI technologies were.

Namely, he said companies that have kept pace with the transformation of the process without pausing their projects and ventures from the start of the pandemic have actually taken critical steps for their future.

"When we consider all these processes, we can say that the investments made in our country have increased exponentially. Meanwhile, the effective implementation of artificial intelligence in the right areas brings the investment back to the company within a few months," Aktaş said and stressed the important role AI played in the survival of companies during the pandemic.

According to Aktaş, AI primarily contributed to the development of health solutions that could combat the pandemic, conducted business processes that had to transform suddenly without complication and helped provide customer services without interruption, while assisting both companies and countries to remain economically strong.

Both in terms of the country and companies, AI has made its long-anticipated breakthrough and has risen to first place in both national development plans and company strategies in order to create more value in the future.