By Kerry Robinson Hi, it’s Kerry here, back to host The Last Mile for a few weeks while Damian takes a well-earned break after graduating from college. ChatGPT will be nearly three years old when the next college year starts this fall, so Damian is probably one of the last cohort of students to start…
By Kerry Robinson Talk shapes output. Most people treat prompting like a vending machine: press button, get snack. But LLMs aren’t mechanical. They’re behavioral – they pick up on tone, structure, and phrasing. Kerry Robinson put it well in his recent Substack post on why we often say please and thank you to AI, and why that’s…
By Kerry Robinson What gets measured gets managed. But what if you’re measuring (and managing) the wrong thing? For the last two decades, customer service has been ruled by metrics like average handle time, tickets closed, and first-call resolution. Those numbers showed up in dashboards. Those dashboards shaped behavior. But now those numbers are starting…
By Kerry Robinson I used to think the best customer service was fast, friendly, and easy. Now I’m not so sure. In the past year, I’ve seen a different kind of gold standard quietly emerging. No service at all. Your refund gets issued before you ask. Your order re-routes before you notice a delay. Your…
By Kerry Robinson Welcome to the first edition of ‘The Last Mile’ 😁 This is the follow up to our Teaching Robots to Talk series, because robots learned to talk, now we need to put them to work! That’s a bigger challenge that cuts cost across AI, CX, and IT, but we’ve got you covered:…
By Kerry Robinson It was 2 years into our ‘Gen AI journey’ before me and my long-time collaborator – Dan Aslet – began trying to transform Waterfield Tech with AI. First, we had to figure out what this new kind of AI was capable of. We did a lot of experimenting and prototyping and built a…
By Kerry Robinson “What happens after we’ve taught the robots to talk?” That’s the question I posed two weeks ago, as conversational AI continues to trend towards: problem solved! This week, my colleague, friend and zen-master of AI-driven transformation, Dan Aslet, painted a vivid picture: they wander the corridors of your tech stack, bumping into locked doors!…
By Kerry Robinson There’s something interesting going on in my inbox. On the one hand I’ve got Gary Marcus telling me LLMs are dumb because they can’t color maps properly. But then AI platform providers and tech bros keep calling for the end of software, work, poverty… you name it! So who’s right? Both! Welcome to the…
By Kerry Robinson Last week Mark Zuckerberg let slip a mind-bender on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast: “If the AI can handle 90 percent of a WhatsApp support call, we’ll probably hire more customer-service people, not fewer.” He was riffing on the idea that – right now – Meta could never afford to build a customer service center. He…
By Kerry Robinson I had a spirited WhatsApp exchange last week that illuminates the gap in understanding of Generative AI at the highest levels in business. My mate is a top insurance industry executive. It started when I shared what I described as an incredible interview and a fantastic, nuanced, authentic feeling performance from Open AI…