GITEX Global–Uniphore, the leader in Conversational AI and Automation, at GITEX Global 2022, announced a strategic partnership with Avaya, a global leader in solutions to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration, to bring its integrated Conversational AI and communications platform to customers across the Middle East and African (MEA) region. "In today's uncertain world, consumers want brands to address their needs quickly and efficiently; this makes the customer experience more important than ever" Uniphore's Conversational AI and Automation products will add deep functionality to the Avaya OneCloud CCaaS platform. Avaya OneCloud CCaaS makes it easy to connect chat, video, voice, and messaging to deliver enhanced experiences for customers and employees at every touchpoint. With Uniphore, Avaya OneCloud CCaaS users will be able to track, measure, and improve their contact center journey with increased self-serve capabilities, frictionless agent experience, and needle-moving insights. Avaya's customers will have access to Uniphore's conversational AI and automation solutions and will be well-placed to digitally onboard customers, including from social media platforms driven by AI-powered solutions.

Avaya showed off its modernized contact center experience in a series of demonstrations last week on how the company is utilizing Cloud 3.0 as well as conversational AI and machine learning into voice, video, chat and messaging without the need for companies to change platforms. Avaya is aiming to improve call center agents' productivity and the overall employee and customer experience by integrating multiple applications into a single modern composable desktop, as well as personalize the customer experience by enabling agents to view and interact with customers on their inquiries. In one use case, a company official showed how an Avaya virtual conversation bot listened to an imaginary patient's medical issue, displayed empathy and then routed them to the appropriate contact to schedule an appointment with a doctor. The goal is to solve customer business problems without having to change platforms and instead "drop a virtual agent in front of existing infrastructure,'' said Director and Chief Evangelist Steve Forcum. Forcum referenced an Avaya retail grocery chain customer that has over 1,000 stores, each with its own phone system from multiple vendors. "We stood up a virtual agent in front of those stores, and they reported a $3 million increase in productivity,'' he said.

According to Deloitte's 2019 Global Contact Center Survey, 56% of companies believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is ready for broad adoption and plan to apply the technology around things like process automation, analytics, routing, and workforce solutions. One area the report doesn't cover, however, is conversational AI, which incorporates AI technologies, like chatbots or voice assistants, with machine learning to improve customer interactions. Research shows the most successful companies are moving cautiously with AI, starting with agent assist or chatbots (nearly 40% of companies are leveraging AI-powered chatbots to interact with customers). Although many companies are not considering conversational AI, today's biggest brands, such as Facebook, Apple, and Google, are signaling AI's rise by making key investments in conversational design. Wherever your organization is along its AI journey, conversational AI is something you must contend with for the future of customer experience.

Avaya today revealed a set of enhancements for its Spaces team collaboration and meeting application that are in part based on the partnership with GPU vendor Nvidia announced last October around the use of that company's cloud-based AI services. Presenter mode -- Using video AI capabilities, presenters can now overlay video on top of slideshows and other content they're sharing, Avaya said in a press release. Noise reduction -- Provides the ability to reduce background noises like dogs barking and loud keyboard typing. Enhanced calling -- Users can now make outbound calls from within Spaces. Additionally, users within Spaces can search and merge contacts from multiple devices, and they can transfer, merge, and manage multiple concurrent calls simultaneously, Avaya said.

Over 80% of executives believe failing to get on board with artificial intelligence (AI) now will cost their organization for the next decade, according to Vanson Bourne. AI is driving revolutionary capabilities across the enterprise with departments like sales, marketing, HR and finance leveraging the technology for some of their most essential functions. As a result, organizations have increased their investment in AI by 23% over the last 12 months. But how are they investing? There are two paths to AI investment: building solutions in-house or buying from a third-party vendor.

We live in a dynamic world in which the most rapidly changing element is the rate of change itself. At the last count, human beings were generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily. In fact, of all the data ever generated in traceable human history, 90 per cent was generated in last two years alone. The above statistics are representative of the underlying avalanche of emerging technologies and solutions that generate this data through the activities of their combined users. These users are being overwhelmed by the increasing number of new platforms and applications they must deal with to conduct their day-to-day business.

Sheila McGee-Smith is a leading communications industry analyst and strategic consultant with a proven track record in new product development, competitive assessment, market research, and sales strategies for customer care solutions and services. Her insight helps enterprises and solution providers develop strategies to meet the escalating demands of today's consumer and business customers. It seems one cannot pick up a newspaper or magazine in 2018 without seeing a headline related to artificial intelligence (AI). In September 2018, The Wall Street Journal published a thought-provoking article, The Human Promise of the AI Revolution. Taking an opposite and certainly a more sensationalist approach, Newsweek had this headline in its Tech & Science section, Forget Terrorism, Climate Change and Pandemics: Artificial Intelligence is the Biggest Threat to Humanity.

The watchwords at Opus Research in anticipation of upcoming privacy regulations is "Precision Without Surveillance". We counsel customer care professionals and digital marketers to prepare for the era of "explicit consent" and the "opt-in" economy. Companies are going to have to justify their collection of personal information by providing something of value in return. It should start with effortless digital experiences, accurate answers and truly Intelligent Assistance. A partnership between communications giant Avaya and the self-described "AI-Pairing" specialist Afiniti is custom made to attack the challenges of "Precision Without Surveillance" by using pattern matching to fulfill on the promise of intelligent routing.

Avaya and one of its A.I.Connect development partners, Afiniti, today announced a strategic partnership designed to improve contact center performance using artificial intelligence (AI). The partnership involves the use of Afiniti's behavioral pairing AI algorithm, which optimizes contact center outcomes by pairing customers with the contact center agents most likely to result in a desired outcome, as I wrote in a No Jitter article published last December. In that post I provided a high-level description of how Afiniti's AI-based customer-agent pairing works, showing where its machine learning algorithms fit in the pairing process. What's new with today's announcement is the depth of the integration between the Afiniti technology and Avaya's contact center software, along with an easier mechanism for Avaya contact center customers to purchase Afiniti's advanced routing capabilities. As part of this partnership agreement, Avaya will create an "AI edition" of Avaya Aura Contact Center Elite.

With the release of a voice assistant for desk phones, Avaya is the latest unified communications vendor to explore whether the artificial intelligence technology increasingly popular among consumers has value in the enterprise market. The voice assistant, available for download in the Google Play Store, lets users verbally command their Avaya Vantage phones to make calls, dial into the next meeting on a calendar, and execute Google searches. People activate the artificial intelligence (AI) technology with a customizable trigger phrase; the default is "Hello Vantage." "Avaya is engaging in far-field voice activation at an inflection point in the industry: Voice assistants will disrupt enterprise communications and UC," Gartner analyst Werner Goertz said. "In future, rather than to dial into meetings and conference calls, we will simply say'Assistant, dial me into my 10 o'clock meeting' -- no user IDs, passwords, conference IDs that the user needs to remember."