Join us on November 9 to learn how to successfully innovate and achieve efficiency by upskilling and scaling citizen developers at the Low-Code/No-Code Summit. Zoom calls are no longer just for work meetings and family reunions. Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) leader, Cresta, wants to make them a channel for customer service too. The company is integrating its AI tools with Zoom to improve the service when customers contact companies through a video call. The integration effectively allows businesses using Zoom to activate Cresta directly through Zoom's interface.

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! Technology venture capital deals may be slowing down, but investment in artificial intelligence (AI) companies continues to boom. Investments in AI research and applications are set to hit $500 billion by 2024, according to research firm IDC, while PwC predicts AI will contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. So, it's no surprise that among the 206 new 2022 "unicorns" – that is, privately held startups with a value of over $1 billion – a boatload are in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The real-time contact center intelligence provider Cresta Intelligence Inc. said today it's updating its platform with the addition of new tools that enable smarter business insights and more capable chatbots. Cresta has created an artificial intelligence-powered platform for contact centers that's designed to guide customer service agents on what to say and do at each turn of a customer conversation. For instance, it provides real-time prompts for agents at pivotal moments in a conversation to optimize their response. At the same time, it coaches agents on an ongoing basis to hone their strengths and correct their weaknesses. In this way, Cresta helps to make sure that agents ask the right discovery questions at the beginning of a conversation, so as to solve customer's problems more effectively.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. Technology venture capital deals may be slowing down, but investment in artificial intelligence (AI) companies continues to boom. Investments in AI research and applications are set to hit $500 billion by 2024, according to research firm IDC, while PwC predicts AI will contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. So, it's no surprise that among the 206 new 2022 "unicorns" – that is, privately held startups with a value of over $1 billion – a boatload are in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Join us at the leading event on applied AI for enterprise business and technology decision makers in-person July 19 and virtually from July 20-28.

"In the future we will be designing our world, not just studying," predicted Robert Dijkgraaf, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, a few weeks ago at DLD Summer in Munich.1 Information gathered from our current world will fuel those designs. Artificial intelligence will guide decisions and help us navigate this new world. The theme of the event--"It's Only the Beginning…"--reflected the journey to realizing these predictions. The panel "Doing Better with Data and AI" addressed new frontiers for using AI to augment human intelligence and the modern data infrastructure required to make it happen.2 Zayd Enam, CEO and Founder of Cresta, argues that the current attitude concerning artificial intelligence is "lazy."3

Over the last decade, artificial intelligence has been a relentless source of business innovation. Over the last decade, artificial intelligence has been a relentless source of business innovation. Now its influence is about to expand dramatically. Once a staple of science fiction, AI has quietly forged a critical role in some of the most ordinary yet essential business tasks. Automation of business processes; data analysis; defect detection in manufacturing; basic interactions with customers -- all are an embedded part of modern business and increasingly enabled by AI.

The debate over whether AI will replace humans in the workforce often boils down to a handy, twofold explanation: AI will replace humans for most repetitive and manual labor tasks, while humans will excel at soft skills like creative communication and relationship-building. While some of this is true -- humans and machines will each play to their strengths -- it probably oversimplifies AI's role in our professional lives. We believe AI will help humans do better human work, namely by helping us improve our emotional intelligence, soft skills, and interpersonal communication skills. Leveraging advances in emotion detection, natural language processing (NLP), and computer vision, and combining it with psychology and linguistics, AI algorithms have gotten better at detecting, analyzing, and processing how tone, pitch, facial expression, eye contact, body language, and dozens of other verbal and non-verbal communication features influence communication. By letting AI tap into your customer conversations, either voice, video, or text, AI can take complex and often puzzling data and find patterns in effective communication not apparent to the naked eye.

Cresta Intelligence, a California-based AI startup, makes businesses radically more productive by using Expertise AI to help sales and service teams unlock their full potential. Cresta is bringing together world-renowned AI thought-leaders, engineers, and investors to create a real-time coaching and management solution that transforms sales and increases service productivity, weeks after application deployment. Cresta enables customers such as Intuit, Cox Communications, and Porsche to realize a 20% improvement in sales conversion rate, 25% greater average order value, and millions of dollars in additional annual revenue. This post discusses Cresta's journey as they moved from a multi-cloud environment to consolidating their machine learning (ML) workloads on AWS. It also gives a high-level view of their legacy and current training and inference architectures.

Cresta, an AI-powered platform that offers real-time support to help customer service agents respond to inquiries on calls or in chats, has raised $50 million in a series B round of funding. The company's latest investment, which was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Allen & Company, and Porsche Ventures, comes after a year of growth that saw its revenues quadruple. It's difficult to read too much into any first-year revenue growth metrics, but it's clear that companies are hankering for technology that helps them optimize their customer-facing operations. Contact centers have proven fertile ground for AI, with a slew of companies emerging to offer their own take on how automation can improve companies' interactions with their customers. Just today, Uniphore announced a fresh $140 million investment to analyze emotion and engagement in both voice and video-based calls, while Talkdesk launched a new "human-in-the-loop" AI trainer for contact centers.

As Silicon Valley's entrepreneurs cluster around the worldview that artificial intelligence is poised to change how we work, investors are deciding which use cases make the most sense to pump money into right now. One focus has been the relentless communication between companies and customer that takes place at call centers. Call center tech has spawned dozens if not hundreds of AI startups, many of which have focused on automating services and using robotic voices to point customers somewhere they can spend money. There has been a lot of progress, but not all of those products have delivered. Cresta is more focused on using AI suggestions to help human contact center workers make the most of an individual call or chat session and lean on what's worked well for past interactions that were deemed successful.