More than half of consumers want GenAI in their digital experiences — can enterprises catch up to expectations?

Coveo (TSX:CVO), a leader in AI platforms that enable individualized, connected, and trusted digital experiences at scale with AI search, Generative Answering, and recommendations today released a new report, GenAI: Can Enterprises Catch Up to Expectations? Conducted by Coveo in partnership with Arlington Research, the report provides key insights around the change in experience expectations and highlights how organizations are lagging by not meeting them.

From surfacing relevant information on company portals, to online shopping support and chatbots offering customer service, people want GenAI to work for them in a conversational, advisory way. 

GenAI in the Workplace

The Coveo report shows that in the workplace, employees are embracing GenAI and its capabilities. 86 percent of respondents say they want to use GenAI at work, and 52% see GenAI as a great tool to find more relevant information. Furthermore, 56% of respondents believe GenAI tools would save them at least an hour a day at work. Yet, shockingly, more than 50% of respondents’ companies don’t have a GenAI policy in place to enable their employees to leverage these capabilities safely and privately. 

GenAI in eCommerce and Service

The report also shows that nearly half of respondents want GenAI as part of their online shopping experience, and that:

• approximately 40% would recommend GenAI/chatbots despite their limitations in shopping and customer service contexts,
• 69% expect quick and accurate responses from AI-driven chatbots, 
• 63% want problem-solving assistance, 50% would like GenAI help finding products, and 79% are comfortable using GenAI for customer support or service-related inquiries.

Interestingly, 63% of respondents say it is important to know whether they are interacting with a human or GenAI/a chatbot. This introduces the concept of a “human in the loop,” a safety net where humans oversee the experience as machines take on the heavy lifting. This is potentially due to nearly 66% of respondents being familiar with hallucinations, or the potential for GenAI to create semantically correct text that is factually wrong. 

“The desire for a human in the loop brings to light key consumer and employee concerns with accuracy and security,” notes Patrick Martin, General Manager of Service Solutions at Coveo. “A whopping 93% say they have concerns about using GenAI chatbots, 62% cite data privacy as their top concern, followed by 73% of respondents that say the accuracy of results is paramount. Using secure content retrieval and linking to the source of truth for fact checking is an imperative for employees and customers.” 

“Interestingly, our research found plenty of contradictions,” Martin continued. “People think GenAI will save them time and increase their proficiency whether they’re shopping, seeking customer support, or in the office. But many don’t fully trust it. People and enterprises are aware of the risks and the opportunities — and that’s a good thing. If done right, companies that embrace GenAI will pull away from their competitors, and everyone will benefit as a result.”

Arlington Research conducted this survey of 2,000 adults on behalf of Coveo between July 1 – 10, 2023. Respondents were all in the United States and work in companies with 500 or more employees.

For complete results of the survey, please download the full report here.

About Coveo
We believe AI is a competitive imperative to deliver the relevant and effective digital experiences people expect, at scale, while maximizing business outcomes and profitability. Coveo accelerates the adoption of AI platforms in enterprises, helping them deliver individualized, trusted, and connected experiences that lead to exceptional business performance.

The Coveo Relevance Cloud™ platform is a market-leading AI platform that combines AI search, AI recommendations, GenAI answering, AI models and analytics. Our platform drives personalization and merchandising intelligence in digital experiences across commerce, service, website, and workplace applications. Coveo’s platform is designed for scale, security and compliance, and can easily integrate into almost any digital user experience a large enterprise delivers with trust. Our platform is cloud-native SaaS, multi-tenant, API-first, and headless.

Coveo has been a pioneer in the application of AI within enterprise digital experiences for more than a decade. Our Coveo Relevance Generative Answering™ capability, which integrates LLM technology with Coveo’s platform to feed generative AI with a common, secure unified index and real-time content and embeddings, helps to drive relevance at scale and consistent factuality, with secure and traceable sources of truth across all channels. Specifically, this helps to solve the key challenges of utilizing generative AI for enterprise use cases.

We help hundreds of the world’s leading brands create tangible financial value. We believe our platform is differentiated by its sophisticated applied AI, designed to deliver highly relevant, bespoke digital experiences that drive superior business outcomes. In addition, our platform’s scalability, rapid time to value, enterprise-grade security and compliance, and native integrations with other third-party technology applications set us apart. We are a Salesforce Summit ISV Partner, an SAPⓇ Endorsed App, and an Adobe Gold Partner.

Coveo is a trademark of Coveo Solutions, Inc.

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