Machine Learning
What is Machine Learning?
Machine learning (ML) is the branch of artificial intelligence in which systems learn patterns from data, rather than following rules written by hand, and use those patterns to make predictions or decisions.
Machine learning has been used in contact centers for years before generative AI: forecasting contact volumes for workforce planning, predicting which customers are likely to churn, routing contacts to the agent most likely to resolve them, detecting fraud and scoring sentiment. Language models are themselves a type of machine learning, trained on very large amounts of text.
An ML model is only as good as the data it learns from. Data that is incomplete, out of date or skewed produces predictions that are wrong in the same ways, so data quality, regular retraining and monitoring for drift are part of running any ML system. The most useful contact-center data is usually the interaction history itself: what customers asked for, and what resolved it.
Related: Generative AI, Fine-tuning, Interaction history.