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.

The potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) seems almost unbounded in its ability to derive and drive new sources of customer, product, service, operational, environmental, and societal value. If your organization is to compete in the economy of the future, then AI must be at the core of your business operations. A study by Kearney titled "The Impact of Analytics in 2020" highlights the untapped profitability and business impact for organizations looking for justification to accelerate their data science (AI / ML) and data management investments: The business, operational, and societal impacts could be staggering except for one significant organizational challenge--data. "The model and the code for many applications are basically a solved problem. Now that the models have advanced to a certain point, we've got to make the data work as well."