**7. The potential of conversational AI**

Despite the distinctive features outlined so far, both chatbots and IVAs are considered conversational interfaces, which organizations – including financial institutions – have recently started to actively and significantly deploy to automate their internal business processes. These applications provide incredible value, as they help to develop promising strategies that leverage AI, and are also impacting our personal lives to a remarkable extent: more and more frequently, customer service programs have been enriched by resorting to AI-powered software that makes "intelligent" customer – as well as employee – experiences available; to stress this point, it must be acknowledged that with conversational AI not only customers but also employees get the answers they need fast.

It's more than simple "if-then" logic, since conversational AI incorporates natural language to make human-to-machine conversations more like human-to-human ones: the outcome can be described in terms of increased customer engagement, continued trust and reliability in doing business, across all industries, and the ability to make the best thinkers and doers in any organization more productive; as a matter of fact, tech-savvy companies are building AI applications to augment business productivity, as well as to innovate business operations, with the ultimate goal being to help boost revenues. Therefore, more and more organizations are extending their efforts to identify additional areas to leverage AI and derive maximum value from it, by resorting to either chatbots or IVAs, as a viable alternative to utilizing both after identifying the right areas of application for each of them.

In general terms, conversational AI refers to technologies which users can talk to: these applications use large volumes of data, machine learning and natural language processing to help imitate human interactions, recognizing speech and text inputs, and translating their meanings across various languages; as far as the outcomes, the applications at issue help to build task-specific, channel-agnostic experiences by integrating data from various systems and channels (like SMS, Voice, WhatsApp

and Facebook Messenger), and to retool teams for operational efficiency by automating the known and handling off the unknown. However, experts tend to label conversational AI's current applications as "weak AI", whereas "strong AI" should focus on a human-like consciousness that can perform a wider field of tasks and solve a broader range of problems [15].
