Artificial intelligence (AI) is driving a great wave of contact center system and application overhauls and upgrades. In the past three years, AI has progressed from a concept with great potential to a practical set of technologies that are being used to reinvent the underpinnings of every contact center system and application. The market is in the early days of this transformation, but its potential is awe-inspiring, as it is going to touch every aspect of what is done in and by contact centers and the customer experience (CX) in general. For the past five decades, contact centers have functioned in basically the same fashion, enabled by as many as 45 different IT sectors of systems and applications. Over the years, vendors have enhanced their solutions and introduced many new features that have improved their performance, but the fundamental capabilities have remained the same.

It was just the latest move in the growing self-service customer experience space. "Consumers can begin a conversation through self-service, and complete the transaction with a live chat agent who has context of the previous conversation," said Scott Horn, chief marketing officer of [24]7. "The ability to use channels interchangeably, pick up where they left off, and never have to start over, results in a superior customer experience." These investments range from omnichannel support to data tagging to intent prediction, said Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting and author of the recent, "2017 Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) Product and Marketing Report" (fee charged). The list of technologies in which these companies are investing money is a long one she said, a list which also includes better content generation, task management and auto content generation among others.