The modern tech industry is undoubtedly exciting. The convergence of several exciting technologies is a significant reason why that’s the case.

Artificial intelligence and virtual reality have both been science-fiction staples for decades. Chatbots are significantly more recent, but businesses are familiar with using live chat applications that have a human on the other end.

Not surprisingly, analysts eagerly wonder what the future holds and how it’ll reshape the business models of tomorrow. There are several likely possibilities.

The Blending of Chatbots With Voice-Powered Assistants

Today, most people interact with chatbots by going to a company’s website or starting a conversation via its Facebook profile. Before long, though, people could talk to chatbots by speaking to their voice-activated assistants, such as Alexa.

Those helpers use artificial intelligence to respond to user’s commands, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility for people to frequently interact with businesses and get questions answered just by talking to Alexa or a similar service.

Government officials in the state of Georgia already created a question-and-answer service that lets people ask things about driver’s licenses, food stamps, and more after activating an associated Alexa skill.

Combining AI With Virtual Reality to Offer Pertinent Training Experiences

Businesses could also tap into the power of virtual reality and artificial intelligence to give employees training scenarios that mimic what they’ll likely experience based on past cases. Chatbot developers already make virtual customer service agents able to respond to the most common queries customers have, so applying that concept to training makes sense too.

Fidelity Investments created VR scenarios for its call center employees, allowing trainees to go into simulated versions of customers’ homes to help them empathize with their situations. Walmart did something similar to equip its employees for the characteristic chaos of Black Friday, requiring workers to strap on headsets and interact with the images they saw.

Soon, the one-size-fits-all approach of training videos could be replaced with VR material generated when AI algorithms mine through data about particular employees and serve them scenarios that mimic the customer service experiences they’ve already had and perhaps fallen short of a company’s expectations in real life.

AI-Powered Chatbots Could Reduce the Workloads of Perpetually Busy Employees

In the not so distant past, many companies rigidly barred employees from using their smartphones at work, asserting that those devices were too distracting. Things have changed now, with statistics indicating 60 percent of companies allow employees to use personal phones for work. To keep up with the changing times, many businesses develop apps and encourage workers to use them.

One of the ways that practice could become even more prominent in the future is if a company’s employees could use chatbot apps to help them figure out what to say to customers in real time. They could rely on the responses when talking to clients themselves or feed the answers into a chatbot.

Virtual reality could also come into the equation if the end user sees an avatar representing the company’s representative on his or her screen.

Boomerang is an email management service for Gmail offering a feature called Respondable. It analyzes content from millions of messages and uses that material to suggest responses for people to write based on tone and the reason for the content.

If employees use a service based on the same principle that utilizes several technologies, they could reduce their workloads without sacrificing the quality of service.

What Security Concerns Exist?

As with most new technologies, some people feel wary about whether their details stay secure when they talk to a chatbot or engage with artificial intelligence. Some of the technological capabilities associated with the latter allow for sifting through gigantic quantities of data in very short periods. But, what do businesses do with the data discovered by AI?

If a person interacts with a VR scenario in his or her home, would components in the program pick up the vocal feedback the individual gives while wandering through a virtual landscape? That’s a strong possibility, especially since both Alexa and the Google Assistant capture voice data and store it.

It’s not hard to see why AI, chatbots and VR collectively provide such rich possibilities for helping businesses do things differently than ever before. For companies to experience potential success, though, it’ll be necessary to accommodate the security-related qualms consumers have and prove that data remains secure as people engage with these emerging technologies.