By 2020, 85% of all customer service interactions will be handled without a human agent. As rapid advancements in technology continue transforming how businesses are developed in the modern world, entrepreneurs are actively exploring smarter ways to operate more efficiently and eliminate issues that have traditionally plagued progress and performance. From enterprise apps that make it easier to track real-time insights and manage customer relationships, to emerging tools that allow clearer communication between teams and a streamlined exchange of data -- one of the most important decisions startup founders face today is selecting the right software. As a result, the average small business is accustomed to integrating a wide range of cloud-based apps to address a complex array of business needs. In 2016, small businesses spent over $55 billion on these cloud-based services, with the average professional using between 10-16 apps daily.

Level39 member DigitalGenius has been voted the most disruptive and innovative UK AI business from a shortlist of 51, earlier this month by BusinessCloud. The 51 AI Innovators list compiled of companies nominated by the public, details some of the UK's most disruptive and innovative companies selected to go through a public voting process to identifying who the tech world thought to be the best. Based on votes received it quickly became a three-horse race between London-based DigitalGenius, Oldham's EnergiMine and Liverpool firm LivingLens. Founded in 2013, DigitalGenius, uses AI to automatically organise and reply to incoming customers messages. The company aims to ensure their AI solutions are easy to use and are truly innovative solutions that deliver great results for their customers.

Earlier this week BusinessCloud published its 51 AI Innovators list, detailing some of the UK's most disruptive and innovative companies. The list was published in alphabetical order so we invited the public to vote for the one they thought should be top – and we were swamped with votes from all round the world. To make it fair it was only one vote per person and/or email address. Based on votes received it quickly became a three-horse race between London-based DigitalGenius, Oldham's EnergiMine and Liverpool firm LivingLens. By the time the voting closed at midday on Thursday the clear winner was DigitalGenius, which uses AI to automatically organise and reply to incoming customers messages.

Artificial Intelligence is currently being deployed in customer service to both augment and replace human agents – with the primary goals of improving the customer experience and reducing human customer service costs. While the technology is not yet able to perform all the tasks a human customer service representative could, many consumer requests are very simple ask that sometimes be handled by current AI technologies without human input. In this article we'll shed light on the current trends and use-cases that business leaders should be considering today. We've broken this article on AI for customer service into the following four sections: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there were just over 2.7 million Americans employed as customer service representatives with a mean wage of $35,170. Any technology that could improve the efficiency of customer service representatives or make some of these positions redundant would potentially produce significant business savings.

Eventually, these humanoids band together in a plot to take over the world. Is that the future of AI? Will the machine become so powerful that it begins to think to a point where it is more capable than the humans? Notice, I said capable, not powerful. No doubt computers are more powerful at giving us answers faster than human brainpower, but are they more capable? That's what people worry about. No, AI will not take over the world. Movies like I, Robot are science fiction, with an emphasis on the word fiction. All that said, AI is a powerful business tool that is supporting companies and their customer service strategies.

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is taking the next step in using artificial intelligence (AI) within its social media service. KLM worked with AI frontrunner, DigitalGenius, to add automated answers to general repetitive questions from customers without the intervention of a human service agent. This gives KLM agents more time to focus on questions in conversations with customers that require a human approach. KLM is the first airline to offer a combination of human agents and artificial intelligence in a single conversation on Twitter, Messenger and WhatsApp. KLM receives over 130.000 mentions via social media per week.

DigitalGenius, a fledgling artificial intelligence (AI) startup that's setting out to automate many facets of customer service, has announced a $14.75 million series A funding round led by Global Founders Capital, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, MMC Ventures, Paua Ventures, Kairos, Runa Capital, RRE Ventures, Lumia Capital, Compound, Spider Capital, and Lerer Hippeau Ventures. Founded out of London in 2013, DigitalGenius connects with companies' CRM and customer service platforms to train AI assistants using transcripts from historical customer service interactions. Using these learnings, the AI is able to predict relevant meta-data about a new case in real time, and even channel a query to the most relevant (human) team members based on the content. It's more about helping human customer service personnel respond quickly to queries using historical precedence, so that when a message is received over email, social media, or other text-based messaging platforms, DigitalGenius can suggest the best answer for an agent to approve. In theory, the model should improve with each human interaction.

Eventually, these humanoids band together in a plot to take over the world. Is that the future of AI? Will the machine become so powerful that it begins to think to a point where it is more capable than the humans? Notice, I said capable, not powerful. No doubt computers are more powerful at giving us answers faster than human brainpower, but are they more capable? That's what people worry about. No, AI will not take over the world. Movies like I, Robot are science fiction, with an emphasis on the word fiction. All that said, AI is a powerful business tool that is supporting companies and their customer service strategies.

Online travel agency TravelBird has been so swamped with business in recent months that it began looking for ways to free up time for its 100 travel advisors so they can continue to assist their customers while still finding time to answer a constant flood of incoming text chats and other social media inquiries. It's all part of TravelBird's mission to work closely with its customers, helping them to carefully plan and research unique travel opportunities they likely would not have found on their own, Fiona Vanderbroeck-Vernooij, who heads travel service and care for the company, told ITPro. The problem was that the company's travel agents had become so overloaded with incoming texts and other social media messages seeking information on flight changes, airport gates, rental cars and other topics that they were being taxed to keep up with the high level of service being sought by the company, she said. To battle that trend, the company began looking at how technology could help. After a search, it found DigitalGenius, which offers its Human AI Customer Service platform that works with either Salesforce or ZenDesk customer service products to automate many of the repetitive tasks customer service agents face every day.

Though deals to private artificial intelligence companies -- excluding incubator/accelerator rounds -- fell 10% in Q2'16, dollar funding reached an all-time high. That was partly thanks to 3 $100M mega-rounds by companies using AI: a $154M Series A round went to China-based healthcare startup iCarbonX (with the participation of Tencent, Vcanbio), a $100M growth equity round was raised by New Jersey-based Fractal Analytics (from Khazanah Nasional Berhad), and there was a $100M Series D round raised by California-based cybersecurity unicorn Cylance (from investors including Blackstone Group, Insight Venture Partners, and Khosla Ventures). Our AI category includes companies applying AI solutions to verticals like healthcare, security, advertising, and finance as well as those developing general-purpose AI tech. Nearly 70% of the deals went to startups in the United States in Q2'16. A majority of the startups raising funds were still in their early-stages: Nearly 60% of the deals went to startups raising seed/angel and Series A rounds, while mid-stage startups (Series B and C) received 12% of the deals.