Kerravala says AI/ML is the only path forward for a business that relies on its network to deliver customer and employee experiences, which is almost every company.

Transcription service companies continue to make claims about their AI, but in the absence of any formal set of benchmarks for natural language processing (NLP), most of those claims lack the context required to make a precise apples-to-apples comparison. Dialpad, for example, recently announced that its Voice Intelligence AI technology has surpassed rivals in terms of both keyword and general accuracy. Along with Google, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Chorus.ai, Avaya, Zoom, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Dialpad provides end users with automated speech recognition (ASR) and NLP capabilities that can be applied to voice calls and videoconferencing sessions in real time. An analysis of general word and keyword accuracy Dialpad published claims it achieves a word accuracy rating of 82.3% and a keyword accuracy rating of 92.5%.

Sign up for our Daily Email newsletter to stay up-to-date on the latest local news throughout Philadelphia. Artificial Intelligence has become a reality in retail stores and this technology has important functions--especially today amidst a global pandemic--since it can be used to analyze inventory, allow contactless payments and even pick up products in the form of robots. AI use is becoming popular among retailers, as it is now being used in stores to facilitate the work of sellers and encourage people to buy more products. According to a Capgemini Research Institute study, by 2018 more than a quarter of retailers worldwide (28 percent) were implementing AI in their stores. The same study revealed that 98 percent of the 400 retailers that implemented the technology expected the number of customer complaints to decrease by up to 15%, while 99% expected AI to increase sales by the same amount.

Data may be driving today's enterprise, but the engine is only using a fraction of its horsepower. A recent information technology study by Cohesity Inc. found that a significant majority -- approximately 80 percent -- of an organization's data is not mission critical. It's languishing in backups, object stores and archives scattered across public and private clouds. The result is data fragmentation, a growing issue within the IT community that involves the spread of information into infrastructure silos, preventing a business from realizing the true value of the data it owns. "We've always had data fragmentation, but it's becoming worse," said Zeus Kerravala (pictured, left), founder and principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting Inc. "It's hampering a company's ability to make critical decisions to be able to move fast and keep up with a lot of cloud-native counterparts. If they don't get a handle on this, they're going to fall further and further behind."

Artifical intelligence will bring many benefits to unified communications, but shallow, consumer-grade AI is not currently up to the task of helping enterprises, according to a speaker at the UC EXPO show. Networking analyst Zeus Kerravala told the London-based show earlier this month that a general set of problems persists in UC, mostly relating to system usability. These include uncertainty over who is in a meeting and who should have been invited, not knowing how to join a meeting, share documents or content, or how to make video features work properly. Future AI-enhanced UC systems could improve meetings with features such as: more intuitive call recording or transcription, perhaps based on keywords; facial recognition and automated identification to aid meeting set-up; or features such as intelligent speaker tracking. Looking further ahead, more advanced AI features could offer users recommendations on who should join a team meeting, proactively finding and loading useful content, or generating minutes.

CIOs may start an AI initiative, but they don't necessarily own it, according to Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research. Instead, AI project ownership quickly spreads throughout an organization -- to sales, marketing, the business and even HR, said Kerravala at the recent AI World in Boston. Nonetheless, the role of the CIO in an AI initiative is substantial because they are responsible for addressing how to integrate AI in ways that augment -- rather than replace -- human work and convincing the CEO and the board of AI's business value, he said. Who within an organization should own an AI initiative? Zeus Kerravala: The ownership of AI in a company is a bit of a strange question because there's no one owner.

Yes, said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research, but it'll likely create many more. At the recent AI World in Boston, Kerravala explained to SearchCIO the biggest barriers to enterprise adoption of AI. The technology's perception as a job-killer ranked at the top of Kerravala's list, along with IT leaders simply not knowing how to employ AI in the workplace. In this video Q&A, Kerravala discusses the strengths of having AI in the workplace, which include better organized meetings and the ability to create jobs. What are the biggest barriers to enterprise adoption of AI technologies?

What if your collaboration tools could actually understand the context of your words and deliver you what you really want, and not just web search results? What if it was like having another person in your office and not just a computer? Cisco Systems is aiming to answer that, in part through a $125 million acquisition of AI company MindMeld, which it announced last month. Cisco wants to incorporate MindMeld's AI platform into its collaboration products, because the tech allows users to build intelligent and human-like conversational interfaces for any application or device. AI-enhanced collaboration tools have the potential to increase efficiency, speed up the discovery of new ideas and lead to improved outcomes for teams that are working together in disparate locations.

For a company set on "moving at warp speed," Cisco's most recent acquisition target, artificial intelligence startup MindMeld, fits in with the geeky futuristic theme the organization has been championing as of late. With AI making enterprise inroads at a rapid clip, across all industries and all kinds of products, Cisco sees investment in this space as an imperative for the success of its Collaboration business unit. The MindMeld acquisition aligns with Cisco's mission to get its products into more hands, faster, which is the message Jens Meggers, Cisco's SVP and GM for the Cloud Collaboration Technology Group, drove home in a recent interview about the company's future vision for collaboration. Cisco will largely leverage the technology to advance Spark, Cisco's team collaboration platform, specifically in the area of ambient listening, as UC analyst Zeus Kerravala told us in his recent No Jitter post on the acquisition. It's easy to conceptualize how AI in the workplace can make workers smarter and more efficient, as Kerravala wrote, calling out an example where a user could ask Spark to summarize Spark messages and identify items that require immediate attention.

Reports are out that a Chinese robot has written and published its first newspaper article. The news comes the same month as a Japanese insurance company announced it was replacing 34 workers with an artificial intelligence system. "This is absolutely a wake-up call," said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with ZK Research, who added that it's time for people to think about their careers and if a robot or A.I. system could easily replace them. "We are the beginning of robots taking jobs," he added. But the fact is, we've had other revolutions -- like the birth of the assembly line."