Amidst the AI revolution, e27 presents a new series showcasing how organisations embrace AI in their operations.
Asnawi Jufrie is the Southeast Asia General Manager of SleekFlow, an omnichannel social commerce platform facilitating conversations across SMS, website live chat, and top social messaging apps.
From early on, Jufrie was interested in contributing positively to his surroundings, emphasising the importance of individual empowerment. With a background in sales and business development, he previously served as the ASEAN Team Lead for Business Development at Salesforce.
In this edition, Jufrie shares how SleekFlow has embraced Artificial Intelligence.
Edited excerpts:
How do you perceive the AI revolution and its potential impact on your industry and workforce?
The emergence of Generative AI, with the breakthroughs made by programs such as ChatGPT, has caused a surge of interest in chat-based AI applications. This has significantly impacted the conversational commerce industry, where this technology has become a game-changer for omnichannel sales platforms like SleekFlow.
I’ve noticed that most people tend to relate AI to chat nowadays. It’s like having Michael Jordan helping with your free throws in basketball – AI can enhance communication skills, maximise your knowledge base, and develop context-aware AI-powered chatbots.
At SleekFlow, we’ve embraced the technology to drive business growth, leveraging its ability to enhance communication skills, expand the knowledge base, and develop remarkable context-aware AI-powered chatbots.
Last quarter, we launched SleekFlow AI for customer support, powered by GPT-4 technology. Our AI-powered chatbots, for instance, can engage in natural, human-like conversations with customers, leading to a much smoother customer experience.
This means maximising touchpoints with consumers by allowing businesses to upload their help documents or website to our upcoming portal to build an extensive knowledge base so that the AI can recommend accurate responses to customer inquiries through WhatsApp.
This frees up time for customer support staff to focus on more complex enquiries that require the human touch. Its summary generator also condenses long chat threads into bite-sized notes, making interactions more productive and helping businesses achieve consistency in consumer brand experience.
In what ways has your company embraced AI technologies to improve operational efficiency or enhance business processes?
At SleekFlow, we recognise AI’s value in improving business operations and customer experience. As such, we have strategically integrated various AI tools into our workflows to help us achieve these goals.
One such built-in tool is Apollo.io, a sales engagement platform that leverages AI to help sales teams prioritise leads and personalise communication. With Apollo, our sales team can automate certain tasks, such as email sequences and follow-up reminders, freeing up time to focus on higher-level tasks, such as building customer relationships.
Another built-in tool we use is Notion.so, a productivity app that incorporates AI features such as natural language processing and machine learning. Notion helps to organise and track internal communication, making it easier for us to collaborate and share information across teams.
We also utilise standalone AI platforms like ChatGPT to enhance customer support operations. Our marketing team, for instance, has been leveraging ChatGPT to brainstorm content ideas, generate SEO blog outlines, and adapt original content for cross-channel distribution.
This frees up time for our writers and marketers to focus on the more creative aspects of their work, such as product marketing and content strategy.
Adopting AI-powered tools not only leads to boosts in productivity but also improves our ROI for those apps we’ve already invested in. It’s a no-brainer!
Can you share specific examples of how AI has been integrated into your workforce to streamline operations or drive innovation?
Let’s take SleekFlow AI as our example.
Regarding customer service, SleekFlow AI can answer support-related inquiries in a manner that is indistinguishable from our human agents. This allows us to deflect more straightforward cases and free up time for our agents to focus on more complex issues.
In sales, it provides a personal coach that scans the entire history of a chat conversation with a customer and provides suggestions on the best item to promote and recommended replies. This not only streamlines the sales process but also ensures a personalised, high-quality customer experience.
Similarly, in marketing, SleekFlow AI can help generate impactful marketing copy in minutes, leveraging its understanding of our company’s branding, products and services, and the goals of the copy.
As for our customers, SleekFlow AI is a useful tool in highly specific industries, such as insurance. The chatbot can recommend personalised health insurance plans based on your customers’ budgets and needs by analysing previous conversations and support materials. This means no more navigating through multiple filters on your virtual help desk. It’s like having a personal assistant for every customer.
What challenges or concerns did you encounter when implementing AI technologies within your organisation, and how did you address them?
To be honest, as a high-growth tech startup, we haven’t encountered many pushbacks from our team when implementing AI technology. We fully embrace it.
As a company, we strongly believe in the rise and ubiquity of AI in our everyday personal and professional lives. We recognise that to stay relevant, we must embrace this technological revolution. It feels like the dot-com era; we want to be at the forefront of this exciting time.
Of course, we understand that some people may be concerned about AI’s impact on human jobs and privacy. But AI can enhance our everyday tasks and remove possible human errors, for example, grammar.
Again, it’s like having Michael Jordan doing the free throws for you in a basketball game – who wouldn’t want that?
That being said, we take these concerns seriously and strive to ensure that our AI technologies are implemented ethically and responsibly. We also recognise the importance of human interaction in certain areas, such as building trust and resolving complex issues.
So while we are embracing AI, we also understand the value of the human touch and are refining how we meld the two.
How do you ensure transparency and uphold ethical considerations in using AI technologies within your organisation to mitigate privacy concerns?
As a data processor and controller of our customer’s data, we take data and privacy concerns extremely seriously. To this end, we have invested significant time and effort in obtaining the required certifications, including the recent ISO/IEC 27001 certification.
This certification is widely recognised as the “gold standard” of third-party validation for security posture. This means that our platform has established a robust infrastructure to manage risks to customer data.
Regarding using AI technologies for customer support, we believe in striking a good balance between security and responsiveness. While automated support has its advantages, it is not always foolproof. There is still a chance of the AI producing inaccurate answers, especially if users try to work around the constraints we have designed.
The model and computing power required to run these systems can also be expensive. Therefore, we believe that a hybrid model that combines automated and human support would be the most effective solution.
To ensure transparency and take into account ethical considerations, we take extra precautions when using external AI platforms to ensure that zero client data and information are uploaded. Within our platform, SleekFlow AI is governed by our robust closed-loop architecture, which is regularly tested by external independent agencies and has passed the required data and security requirements.
By offering a range of AI models and prioritising accuracy and security, businesses working with SleekFlow can get the best possible AI-powered support while maintaining full transparency and meeting the highest ethical standards.
How do you ensure that AI technologies complement your workforce’s existing skills and expertise rather than replacing or displacing human workers?
I believe that while AI has its advantages, it can never fully replace humans. As Jack Ma said, “You can always make a machine to learn the knowledge. But it is difficult for machines to have a human heart.” We understand that it is the collective wisdom and experiences of people that bring a business idea to life.
In the case of entrepreneurship, if businesses could be built from theories and machines alone, every business would have already succeeded. The founders, business owners, and teammates, who are made up of people, share collective wisdom and experiences to bring life to a business idea. That’s why I think AI is not here to replace humans; it’s here to enhance them.
We take a human-centric approach to AI development to ensure that AI technologies complement our workforce’s existing skills and expertise. We should involve our workforce in the AI development process and provide training and upskilling opportunities.
We should also focus on developing AI solutions that automate repetitive tasks, allowing our workforce to focus on more strategic and creative tasks that require human skills and expertise.
How do you envision the future collaboration between humans and AI? What role do you see AI playing in augmenting human capabilities?
A hybrid model that combines the strengths of AI-powered chatbots and human workers is ideal.
We built SleekFlow AI to foster AI-human collaboration as the way forward, with AI augmenting human capabilities to provide objective and wise consultation while also being able to stand in for humans on certain occasions.
Just like Alfred can never replace Bruce Wayne as Batman, AI can never replace humans, but it can support us in our day-to-day activities and tasks – and vice versa.
What advice would you give to founders looking to leverage AI in their workforce?
Embrace it! As a founder, you are built to innovate, dream of what’s possible, and be the front-runner for change. Leveraging AI is the surest way of staying relevant and being part of the inevitable domino effect: the AI revolution.
It could transform whole industries, not just conversational commerce and society. As a founder, it’s crucial to stay ahead of the curve and explore how AI can be used to augment human capabilities.
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