Generative AI
What is generative AI?
Generative AI is artificial intelligence that creates new content, such as text, summaries, replies, images or code, in response to an instruction, rather than only classifying or predicting from existing data.
In a contact center, generative AI is most often used to draft replies for agents, summarize a conversation when it ends, suggest the next best action and answer routine questions in self-service channels. Most text-based generative AI runs on a language model trained on large amounts of written language.
Because a generative model produces the most likely answer rather than looking one up, it can sound confident while being wrong (see AI hallucination). Contact centers therefore ground its answers in approved knowledge, keep an agent in the loop for customer-facing decisions, and log what the AI suggested and why. Used this way, generative AI takes routine writing and searching off agents so they can spend their time on the conversation itself.
Related: Large language model (LLM), Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), Agent assist.