While general purpose chatbots haven't shaped user interfaces as radically as early advocates like Facebook may have hoped, when used in a more targeted capacity, they have shown promise in building closer relationships between consumers and brands and making critical enterprise workflows more streamlined. India's Yellow Messenger operates a conversational AI platform used by companies including Accenture, Flipkart and Grab to communicate with employees and customers. The startup is announcing new funding as they officially launch their chatbot platform stateside. The Bengaluru-based company tells TechCrunch they've closed a $20 million Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The startup previously raised funding from Lightspeed India Partners, which led the startup's Series A last year.

IT support has plagued enterprises for years. And for good reason: existing solutions haven't changed for almost two decades. Employees typically either send an email or navigate to an archaic web portal to file an IT ticket and endure long wait times (often days). What's interesting is that the syntax behind IT support tickets hasn't changed much over time: "I can't seem to reset my salesforce password?"; "My laptop screen got cracked"; "My email is not working."

Enterprise AI: An applications perspective takes a use case driven approach to understanding the deployment of AI in the Enterprise. Designed for strategists and developers, the book provides a simple and practical roadmap based on application use cases for AI in Enterprises. The authors (Ajit Jaokar and Cheuk Ting Ho) are data scientists and AI researchers who have deployed AI applications for Enterprise domains. The book is used as a reference for Ajit and Cheuk's new course on Implementing Enterprise AI. The term'Enterprise' can be understood in terms of Enterprise workflows.