IBM Watson and Autodesk reinvent customer service

Every year, companies spend 1.3 trillion dollars on 265 billion customer service calls. On average, the cost to find and hire a call center agent costs $4000 (not including salary), with an additional $4,800 for training -- and with frustrated agents tending to drop like flies in the face of an often brutally stressful job, these costs mount up. AI, or what IBM calls cognitive computing, is changing that. Autodesk began piloting the IBM Watson Conversation Service in June 2016 as a virtual agent called OTTO, later enhancing it and renaming it AVA (Autodesk Virtual Agent) in February 2017. The return on investment has been tremendous, says Rob High, IBM vice president and Watson chief technology officer and one of the featured speakers at VB Summit coming up on October 23 and 25 in Berkeley, CA.