Riccardo Amati is joined by Andrey Anikin, CEO of Alaris Labs to discuss the main challenges and opportunities of the messaging industry from a software vendor perspective.
You are known for a strong human support team. If you embedded AI agency to frontline support tomorrow, would your clients notice?
Currently, yes. We have been running some experiments in that regard, and so far, they have shown that human engineers are still smarter, more responsive, more flexible than the AI-based assistants.
But that is the end of the story, because AI technologies have made a huge progress recently and obviously tomorrow the picture may look completely different. But so far, it is our human support team who are out there keeping the customers happy.
Are there any parts of your platform today to make autonomous decisions using AI?
Yes and no. Like in ‘The Terminator,’ when machines were left to make decisions on their own, that ended up in a disaster. Taking this to a smaller landscape of our platform and our business, we are not yet allowing AI to be fully independent. One of the modules that we have recently released, which is called the AI Traffic Classifier, is independent in its field.
It is a narrow scope, because all it does is the analysis of the traffic or the message like texts, patterns, and other parameters, identifying spam.
Is it possible to let AI write all your code?
No, it is not. I have a few examples where AI when left unsupervised may become quite dangerous. When software developers let the AI do the job and they think they control it, all of a sudden, at the end of the day, they normally discover that after a few normal stable commits, AI starts thinking it is smarter than the human developer, and all of a sudden, some of the system modules may disappear, because AI thinks they are not necessary in the system.
What is the biggest challenge facing the industry?
Particularly for the messaging industry the biggest challenge is probably the artificial inflated traffic. Because 10 years ago, the messaging world was able to enjoy much greater margins. People did not have to resort to a variety of nasty tricks to pump up the volumes of their traffic. Now we see that the margins have gone way down.
To be able to survive and generate decent money on one’s traffic, their volumes must be impressive. And the most obvious way for quite a few of the industry players is to resort to cheating, like artificially generated traffic.
As an answer to that, people try moving to what they perceive as more secure channels of delivery of messages like WhatsApp or RCS and now we see quite a lot of traffic being moved from conventional SMS.
What skills to develop to avoid being replaced by AI by 2030?
If it is about technical specialists, I still do not think good software designers will be replaced by AI. And if it is about somebody from the business development side, I have a few words of advice. Keep reading, keep exercising your critical thinking to keep your brain sharp and develop your soft skills.
AI is not going to replace us human beings in the areas where it is about personal communication, for example at live exhibitions. Traveling is expensive, it is difficult, but it is very efficient when you sit with a person at a table face to face.
It is way more efficient than any kind of like emails, messages, and video calls. So, I do not think AI is going to replace us in this field anytime soon.
