With more and more evolution, Conversational AI is advancing at a great pace and making it possible for machines to interact with humans via natural language. 

Here are some of the Conversational AI trends that Ajay Kapoor covered in a recent article on Artificial Intelligence in Plain English:

With the conversational AI market capped off 2020 at $4.8 billion and continue this growth with around $13.9 billion valuations by 2025. it’s crystal clear that conversational AI will be at the forefront and bring more advancements this year. We can associate its perks with the chatbots and virtual agents that provide automated customer interactions at a scale, particularly during the days where in-person customer services are prohibited or discouraged due to COVID 19 pandemic.

As the technology is buzzing continually in the market, it can be challenging to cut through the noise. But Gartner has upgraded its prediction in the Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence and declared conversational AI a leading use case for artificial intelligence.


While looking to implement this technology in your business, keep in mind that there will be a crowded marketplace in the next 12–18 months. And in this race, various vital trends will define the market and help the companies with the right technology. In 2021, there are mainly three trends that will be followed and promote advancement. So, let’s begin with these popular conversational AI trends 2021:

1. COVID-19 has accelerated adoption plus increased the smarter bots’ demand

The IDC’s report published in April 2020 identified the extensive adoption of conversational AI. In the online business, every industry, government agencies, and healthcare service providers used conversational AI technology to relieve the enormous overnight increase in customer service inquiries created due to COVID 19.

Though pre-pandemic, launching a simple FAQ bot was enough to call it a day. Industries like banks and insurance agencies, with complex product plus policy portfolios, dealt with their daily traffic volume sometimes two or three times, plus some solutions wrapped under pressure.

It means in 2021, vendors have to set up their game with proprietary natural language technologies to develop smarter, more capable virtual agents that provided instant answers and interpret human conversation nuances, plus act on essential processes well.

A simple chatbot that answers questions on a few hundred topics sounds like building a house on shaky ground. It may fine initially, but later on, it starts falling.

Deploying transactional capabilities like automating loan forbearance and deep integrations with RPA, OCR, and voice technologies are much better. By 2021, it will become the new normal for conversational AI, unleashing its highest potential.

2. Shorter Development Cycles With Technology To Match

The next interesting conversational AI trend that rose in the pandemic year is the shift of long-drawn-out pilot projects towards accelerated project development cycles. Gartner notes that AI development is wisely accelerating AI development due to the pandemic to see returns much sooner.

Vendors have to keep up with this demand, and that’s why they are working on this technology and implementation practices to accommodate this shift. To avoid any confusion one can hire ai

Self-learning artificial intelligence will become a significant force in 2021, allowing for a substantial reduction in the time it needs to develop and deploy virtual agents while also improving their maintenance and development.

The technology helps in scanning and indexing a company’s existing website and obtain relevant information to build a useful model in a matter of hours — something that generally takes weeks and hundreds of working hours to do manually.

This acceleration in the development cycle supported by self-learning AI will eliminate entry barriers to starting a conversational AI project, and it will occur drastically.

Accelerated proofs-of-concept will replace sandboxes-as-sales-tactics. It will needs vendors to prove that their solution can fulfil its promises and that businesses will start to see a real return on investment day zero.

3. Data-driven virtual agent design will become important in 2021

More and more businesses are using conversational AI to automate large parts of their customer service interactions and analyze data. This reveals that creating better user experiences will become key. By 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms on a daily basis - (Gartner).

Market-leading technology will always remain essential, but combining evidence-based design with a no-code or low-code platform operated by existing customer service agents will become a vital factor in the success of conversational AI projects in the future.

Around 80% of the emerging technologies will have an AI foundation by 2021. It portrays a clear picture of the importance of artificial intelligence in the coming days. And here, conversational AI has proven that it’s highly adaptable plus capable of assisting all the industry types and customers in the time of unprecedented challenges.

That’s what conversational AI embraced in 2020, and now it’s all set to proliferate in 2021.