And it's more important than ever for companies to evaluate the new technologies teams are implementing to ensure they are facilitating the desired outcomes, as well as to assess a particular technology's potential application to other areas and teams in the company. "In a sales organization, for example, certain teams may have access to certain tools that increase their productivity. Other teams might be able to benefit from that as well," says Hughell. "It's important when we bring in new technologies that we negotiate our contracts such that they're flexible, so we can determine who needs the technology." When evaluating new technologies to drive and support distributed workforces, Hughell suggests paring up individuals, which not only helps people learn, but drives adoption of the new technology and helps the company assess whether it's bringing the expected results. "I always tell my leaders inspect what you expect. Don't just buy a piece of technology, roll it out and expect miracles to happen," she says. "You have to drive adoption and usage, and you might find that it was the wrong technology and it's not serving your desired outcome or purpose, at which point, make that decision as a leader to fast fail and move on." The most important best practice is to do what's necessary to empower your employees to succeed. Providing libraries of bite-size instruction videos, for instance, can help team members learn specific features of new technology related to their work, without having to sit through long training sessions. Creating the atmosphere of learning and collaboration is as important to a company's success as implementing the new technology. "At the end of the day," says Hughell, "if you can show someone that you're going to help empower their success and help increase their productivity and reduce friction in their day-to-day operation, not many people would argue with that."

Conversational artificial intelligence serves as the interface between a person and a computer, through which organizations can achieve engaging two-way interactions. The technology is usually associated with call centers and virtual assistants/chatbots, although it can be applied in practically every vertical industry. Thanks to machine learning and AI breakthroughs during the last couple of years, conversational AI has grown beyond chatbots to include a variety of use cases. The next wave of IT innovation will be powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. We look at the ways companies can take advantage of it and how to get started.

AI Daily Roundup starts today! We are covering the top updates from around the world. The updates will feature state-of-the-art capabilities in artificial intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation, Fintech and human-system interactions. We will cover the role of AI Daily Roundup and their application in various industries and daily lives. SEMrush, leading online visibility management, and content marketing SaaS platform, has further expanded its ecosystem with the acquisition of a 100% stake in fast-growing public relations SaaS startup Prowly.com.

While most people are familiar with the term "AI," it's often considered science fiction. But as technology advances, AI is being introduced to the workplace, and it has a lot of applications. One of these is video conferencing, where it can help reduce the amount of busywork you might otherwise need to do. As more workplaces switch to cloud phone systems like RingCentral, taking meeting notes can get tricky. The usual difficulties of meetings -- people talking over each other, going off topic, or going unheard -- are often worse on video calls.

In this special guest feature, Sam O'Brien from RingCentral, outlines how AI-driven tools and advancements are changing the face of UC for businesses. Sam is the senior website optimization and user experience manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at RingCentral. He has a passion for innovation and loves exploring ways to collaborate more with dispersed teams. The potential applications of AI are stunningly wide-ranging. There's hardly an industry, niche, or sector where the tech isn't proving to be a game changer.

Communications drive business and when you also strategically use artificial intelligence and machine learning it can help improve your business results. RingCentral's open platform allows for a wide variety of AI and ML solutions to integrate with our cloud communications platform to help businesses drive results. This article will provide an overview of major use cases that have been successfully built and deployed so you can get an idea of where the opportunities are. Sales conversations are often measured for effectiveness and with RingCentral partners you'll be able to use specific post-call analysis, which will allow you to help teams provide coaching to improve the performance of their agents. Post-call analysis compares each agent with the best agents, providing personalized recommendations for each agent and also a dashboard for managers.

The global market for AI is projected to grow to a value of $89.8 billion by 2025, according to Statista. When you consider figures like that, it's easy to see how AI could transform the future of work. Artificial intelligence has the power to affect everything that we do. Already, it's changing the way that we order products, manage our home, and gather information. According to the World Economic Forum, AI machines handled about 29% of the tasks across 12 industries in 2018.

Daniel heads up Product Management for RingCentral in EMEA. He has spent his career at RingCentral driving the expansion of cloud Business Communication solutions in the UK and EMEA via the adoption of exciting, innovative features and services as well as their integration into customers' workflows. He has spent the last 8 years in the cloud software and communication industries and his background is in software development and telecoms infrastructure.

Lately it seems that AI is our knight in shining armor, the missing link between our past and our future. AI is now being used to steer the direction of hedge funds and drive much needed efficiency upgrades to our supply chains, for example. The machine learning society introduced a face recognition algorithm that is able to distinguish gender with an accuracy of up to 91%. AI is becoming so commonplace, in fact, that our electronics are often using it in the background to improve our experience, from taking a picture or securing our devices, without us even knowing it. Smaller AI startups are introducing AI services that can help sales teams surface talking points that closes deals. According to Element AI, a specialty lab in Montreal, "in the entire world, fewer than 10,000 people have the skills necessary to tackle serious artificial intelligence research."

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has captured the human imagination since its inception. With that, there's a tendency for that imagination to veer towards machines "taking over" in some way. Often, the predictions are apocalyptic (think Terminator, I, Robot, or practically any other movie involving AI). Other times, we're warned of AI rendering one profession or another redundant. Basically, we're all going to either die, or be unemployed.