Digital assistants (DA) have evolved from basic tasks like placing online food orders, checking the weather, getting sports updates, and listening to music in the car. Digital assistants are becoming increasingly sophisticated! Many more use cases are guiding various market innovations in various verticals. Technological advances, increasing demand for outsourced assistance, increased focus on enhancing customer loyalty, the acceptance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, and improvements in Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and the Internet of Things are all driving the global digital assistant sector (IoT). By 2024, the number of digital assistants will reach 8.4 billion units – a number higher than the world's population!

It is the first AI simulation solution that allows contact center agents to practice handling multiple incoming chats from customers simultaneously. Training leaders can now empower agents to master high-impact chat topics with their personal unbiased Zenarate AI Coach simulating a customer while providing in-the-moment coaching. According to data from Zendesk, customer satisfaction ratings for live chat (85%) are second only to phone support (91%). In addition to call simulations, Zenarate AI Coach brings AI chat simulation to leading contact centers in 12 languages to develop confident, well-prepared new hire agents before their first chat. It also helps close tenured chat agent skill gaps to increase agent speed proficiency and responsiveness in handling concurrent chat engagements.

It's been well documented that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformation initiatives. ZK Research data found that 74% of companies have moved digital initiatives up by at least one year. Most modernization projects tend to revolve around customer experience (CX), which makes sense, given CX is now the top brand differentiator. A single bad experience can lead to a lost customer and a damaged brand reputation. One thing that's often overlooked is that employee experience (EX) and CX are tied together because customer interactions are still commonly handled by people.

Of all the use cases for the myriad dimensions of Artificial Intelligence--including technologies both central and contiguous to AI--that for implementing intelligent contact centers is one of the most convincing. "One of the reasons it's extremely important for companies to do a good job on contact centers is that's a touch point for them with their customers," Kohli explained. "So, when someone is calling in or interacting by direct phone, chat interface, or something else, that is how they judge a company: how quickly they get a response, what is the level of the response, how effective the agent was." An artful confluence of Robotic Process Automation, machine learning, taxonomies, and cloud computing can empower contact center agents with all the information they need to swiftly understand who customers are, grasp the reason for their interactions, and complete their requests in a speedy manner to improve customer satisfaction. That they're able to do so by automatically accessing any number of disparate systems and technologies on the backend only increases the ROI for investing in such a solution, making AI more ubiquitous across the contemporary business landscape.

If you are reading this on your mobile phone, congratulations – you are a cyborg. Do not worry, we all are. Any tight integration and enhancement of our human cognition with machine-based intelligence are, in a sense, the creation of a cyborg system, scientists argue. And this enhancement is only set to increase, as we continue to augment our brains to be more productive in the future of work. However, although we will all work together with intelligent machines and AI to get the job done in the future, there are degrees to the level in which we will be cyborgs.

The mandate for today's CIO has changed markedly over the past decade. What was once a predominantly technical role has expanded to include leading most businesses through digital transformation initiatives. For most businesses, improving customer experience (CX) is their top digital initiative, as CX is now the top brand differentiator. To improve CX, however, companies must rethink how things have been done in the past so as to remove much of the friction of customer engagements. Once such example is bridging the islands of sales, marketing, and customer service.

The mandate for today's CIO has changed markedly over the past decade. What was once a predominantly technical role has expanded to include leading most businesses through digital transformation initiatives. For most businesses, improving customer experience (CX) is their top digital initiative, as CX is now the top brand differentiator. To improve CX, however, companies must rethink how things have been done in the past so as to remove much of the friction of customer engagements. Once such example is bridging the islands of sales, marketing, and customer service.

Artificial intelligence (AI) conjures both awe and fear in many people. What was once a cool, sci-fi concept is now being touted as a viable contender to replace humans in industries from the assembly line to the call center. Understanding the scope and limits of AI and how it can benefit and complement human agents in industries like the contact center can go a long way to allaying workers' fears about being replaced by a machine. Rather than looking at AI as a replacement for the contact center agent, call centers would be well served to use it to enhance the customer experience and improve efficiencies within the workplace. For instance, we recently discussed how the use of predictive scheduling can actually improve call center agent health and boost efficiencies within the contact center. Solutions like the Genesys (News - Alert) Automated Forecasting and Scheduling product do just that, using AI to predict the best and most efficient staffing schedules.

The two qualities can also create a competitive advantage, which is key priority for growing organizations. While agents hold the keys to your company's success, they are also the most expensive resource you have – accounting for 60% to 70% of expenses in a contact center. Depending on organizational needs, call centers can implement an array of different technologies, from basic to sophisticated. Monet Software predicts in their study that call centers using workforce management systems generally experience a minimum reduction of 2% for staff hours with an average potential savings in the 5-10% range. With workforce management it is generally expected that at least 25% of the time currently devoted to manual input can be saved.

A 2017 Tractica report on the natural language processing (NLP) market estimates the total NLP software, hardware, and services market opportunity to be around $22.3 billion by 2025. The report also forecasts that NLP software solutions leveraging AI will see a market growth from $136 million in 2016 to $5.4 billion by 2025. In order to shed more light on the growing applications of NLP solutions, Dan Faggella, the CEO of TechEmergence, converses with Vlad Sejnoha, the CTO of Nuance Communications, an organization offering AI and NLP solutions in voice, natural language understanding, reasoning and systems integration. Vlad Sejnoha has been the Senior Vice President and CTO at Nuance since 2001. He holds a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from McGill University. Vlad has been working in the field of NLP and speech recognition for over 30 years and holds 22 patents to date.