Gartner Supply Chain Executive Summit -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today launched Business Transactional Intelligence (BTI), an AI-powered solution that offers anomaly detection and visualization capabilities for mitigating supply chain disruptions and accelerating data-driven decision making. BTI, part of IBM's Supply Chain Business Network, enables companies to garner deeper insights into supply chain data to help them better manage, for example, order-to-cash and purchase-to-pay interactions. The technology does this, in part, using machine learning to identify volume, velocity and value-pattern anomalies in supply chain documents and transactions. Machine learning is a method used to teach artificial intelligence how to learn from data, spot patterns and make decisions on its own. This enables companies to discover potential issues faster and resolve them before they escalate and impact the business.

The "Artificial Intelligence - Top 10 Applications in Healthcare, Global, 2018-2022" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. This study analyzes over 250 global companies which are active in providing AI solutions for healthcare applications. Additionally, it provides an assessment of the emerging AI vendor ecosystem and also a capability profile for select Companies to Action across the identified top 10 application areas of AI in the healthcare industry. Amongst these, we identified market disruptors, including both start-ups and established enterprises, which have the potential to shape future application growth. Artificial intelligence (AI) is exhibiting real promise across multiple industries.

Twenty-five percent of customer service and support operations will integrate virtual customer assistant (VCA) or chatbot technology across engagement channels by 2020, up from less than two percent in 2017, according to Gartner, Inc. Speaking at the Gartner Customer Experience Summit in Tokyo today, Gene Alvarez, managing vice president at Gartner, said more than half of organizations have already invested in VCAs for customer service, as they realize the advantages of automated self-service, together with the ability to escalate to a human agent in complex situations. "As more customers engage on digital channels, VCAs are being implemented for handling customer requests on websites, mobile apps, consumer messaging apps and social networks," Mr. Alvarez said. "This is underpinned by improvements in natural-language processing, machine learning and intent-matching capabilities." Organizations report a reduction of up to 70 percent in call, chat and/or email inquiries after implementing a VCA, according to Gartner research. They also report increased customer satisfaction and a 33 percent saving per voice engagement.

Punchh, the leader in digital marketing solutions for physical retailers, today announced the launch of Punchh Deep Sentiment Analysis. The new product allows brands to extract valuable insights from customer reviews using Punchh's natural language comprehension engine built with industry-leading deep learning and artificial intelligence. Its natural language processing model achieves human-level performance, defined as more than 93 percent accurate, and features multi-language support. "In today's hyper-competitive climate, brands need to do everything they can to foster and nurture direct customer relationships, and paying attention to customer reviews is an essential part of that," said Shyam Rao, CEO of Punchh. "Manually reading every review is prohibitively time-consuming for most retailers, which leads to slower response times and poor customer experiences. Our solution uses AI and machine learning to help brands analyze reviews at scale and immediately identify critical information so they can focus on high-level insights and make quick decisions to strengthen customer relationships and increase loyalty."

Match is becoming the first major dating app to provide its premium users with personally-tailored advice through a free human coach. The company announced today that it is beginning to roll out a new service called AskMatch which allows its paid users to chat on the phone with one of the company's dating hired'experts.' According to a report from TechCrunch, Match members can pick their coach's brains on a variety of topics that include how to set up a good dating profile, getting over a break up, or more general advice on dating. In multiple phone interviews, Match CEO, Hesam Hosseini said that the service will help to push the online dating platform, which has been in existence since 1995, into the future. 'Match's mission has always been around relationships and bringing people together.

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The launch comes after years of research and improvements using artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language generation (NLG). According to Statista 2.14 billion people worldwide will buy goods and services online by 2021. In Canada, PayPal reports that eCommerce businesses are growing 28 times more than those who are not selling online. As more consumers turn to the web to research and purchase items, product content becomes increasingly important in order to drive this level of growth. According to Salsify 51% of the time, a product listing with more bullets will convert at a higher rate and outrank its top competitor.

Cisco announced today that it was open-sourcing the MindMeld conversation AI platform, making it available to anyone who wants to use it under the Apache 2.0 license. MindMeld is the conversational AI company that Cisco bought in 2017. The company put the technology to use in Cisco Spark Assistant later that year to help bring voice commands to meeting hardware, which was just beginning to emerge at the time. Today, there is a concerted effort to bring voice to enterprise use cases, and Cisco is offering the means for developers to do that with the MindMeld tool set. "Today, Cisco is taking a big step towards empowering developers with more comprehensive and practical tools for building conversational applications by open-sourcing the MindMeld Conversational AI Platform," Cisco's head of machine learning Karthik Raghunathan wrote in a blog post. The company also wants to make it easier for developers to get going with the platform, so it is releasing the Conversational AI Playbook, a step-by-step guide book to help developers get started with conversation-driven applications.

UBS Card Center, which processes roughly 25 percent of all credit cards in Switzerland, has won the Security Innovation of the Year award at the Retail Banker International Awards, presented in London. UBS Card Center's fraud team used the the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities in the FICO Falcon Platform to stop 84 percent more fraudulent transactions last year than in 2015. The need to optimise costs in the face of fierce competition meant UBS Card Center had to keep fraud write-offs to the very minimum. They were facing new fraud attack volumes but needed to uphold the highest standards for customer experience and satisfaction. This required the use of machine learning to minimize consumer interruptions while investigating more potential cases of fraud, all without adding staff.

If you write in Microsoft Word Online, you'll soon have an AI-powered editor at your side. As the company announced today, Word will soon get a new feature called "Ideas" that will offer writers all kinds of help with their documents. If writing is a struggle for you, the most important feature of Ideas is surely its ability to help you write more concise and readable text. You can think of this as a grammar checker on steroids, as it goes beyond fixing obvious mistakes and focuses on making your writing better. It uses machine learning, for example, to suggest a rewrite when you mangled a complex phrase.