Meet Amelia, IPSoft's Strikingly Human-Seeming AI: What She Means For Customer Support And Society

The masters of cutting-edge AI technology recently granted me an advance visit to Amelia City, the not-yet-open lab and showplace for Amelia, IPsoft's notably humanesque AI. Amelia is so far best known for customer support/helpdesk applications (which is where my own clients, as a customer support and customer experience consultant, have encountered her to date) though her deployments have been expanding into other areas including medicine, HR, fundraising, and more. "Her" marquee clients already include some 20 of the Fortune 100, and the company is now developing pre-trained, limited-function mini-Amelias for small and medium-size businesses as well. Amelia City is at the very tip-end of Manhattan, with striking views of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty that are the mirror image of what immigrants starting a new life here would have seen. According to IPsoft CEO Chetan Dube (more from him soon), Amelia is going to bring nearly as dramatic a change to the inhabitants of our world: a new life both for better–economic results and freedom from drudgery–and worse–mass disruptions that will require workforce retraining and, probably, government interventions–and will do so with great inevitability. But let's not jump ahead.