Businesses and corporations are increasingly interested in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to their operations, but see themselves falling behind in implementing AI, according to a research survey report from Talkdesk with relevance for insurtech. Insurance has a "heightened challenge of being able to get organizational life and culture driving towards the adoption and embracing of AI," said Antonio Gonzalez, senior manager, industries and AI research at Talkdesk. Talkdesk surveyed 500 customer experience professionals from the U.S., Canada, France, Germany and the U.K., with about 7% of respondents from the financial services sector including insurance.

Businesses and corporations are increasingly interested in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to their operations, but see themselves falling behind in implementing AI, according to a research survey report from Talkdesk with relevance for insurtech. Insurance has a "heightened challenge of being able to get organizational life and culture driving towards the adoption and embracing of AI," said Antonio Gonzalez, senior manager, industries and AI research at Talkdesk. Talkdesk surveyed 500 customer experience professionals from the U.S., Canada, France, Germany and the U.K., with about 7% of respondents from the financial services sector including insurance. However, according to Talkdesk, respondents still report a lack of AI professionals who can build, train and maintain AI solutions. Particularly in insurance, there is more personnel turnover, according to Ilya Filipov, director of financial services industry strategy, Talkdesk.

The graph represents a network of 2,962 Twitter users whose tweets in the requested range contained "#cx", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets. The network was obtained from the NodeXL Graph Server on Monday, 17 January 2022 at 01:14 UTC. The requested start date was Sunday, 16 January 2022 at 01:01 UTC and the maximum number of days (going backward) was 14. The maximum number of tweets collected was 7,500. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 3-day, 7-hour, 28-minute period from Wednesday, 12 January 2022 at 17:28 UTC to Sunday, 16 January 2022 at 00:56 UTC.

Recently, Talkdesk hosted a webinar on The future of AI in contact centers that featured Paul Lasserre, global segment lead – applied AI Solutions at AWS, Margi Deinlein, customer insights manager at Talkdesk, and Jay Gupta, director of product marketing at Talkdesk. The panel discussed the present-day challenges holding organizations back on a progressive path to AI maturity and how these limitations can be overcome in an increasingly automated world. They also discussed the evolving perceptions of AI and its maturity in the field of customer experience (CX). In this webinar, Margi Deinlein from Talkdesk discussed the results from a recent global survey of over 900 CX professionals. These results indicated that 69% of CX professionals believed in the importance of AI in the contact center, endowing contact centers with a pivotal role in accepting the challenge and adopting AI to create value.

Talkdesk, a provider of cloud-based contact center software, announced $230 million in new Series D funding that more than triples the company's valuation to $10 billion, Talkdesk founder CEO Tiago Paiva confirmed to TechCrunch. New investors Whale Rock Capital Management, TI Platform Management and Alpha Square Group came on board for this round and were joined by existing investors Amity Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Top Tier Capital Partners, Viking Global Investors and Willoughby Capital. Talkdesk uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve customer service for midmarket and enterprise businesses. It counts over 1,800 companies as customers, including IBM, Acxiom, Trivago and Fujitsu. "The global pandemic was a big part of how customers interact and how we interacted with our customers, all working from home," Paiva said.

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. Talkdesk, which provides an enterprise contact center platform, today announced that it raised $230 million at a post-money valuation of $10 billion. The round, which came from Whale Rock Capital Management, TI Platform Management, Alpha Square Group, Amity Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Top Tier Capital Partners, Viking Global Investors, and Willoughby Capital, brings the company's total raised to $498 million to date. Over the past several years, businesses have increasingly turned to cloud-based contact centers to address budding customer service challenges. The pandemic accelerated that move -- service conveniences were put in place out of necessity, which gave customers more options for interacting with companies. For example, 78% of contact centers in the U.S. now intend to deploy AI in the next 3 years, according to Canam Research.

Calldesk, the European pioneer in AI-powered voice agents, and Talkdesk, the cloud contact center for innovative enterprises, announced a partnership to accelerate the deployment of conversational AI in contact centers. Via the partnership with Calldesk, Talkdesk customers will now be able to leverage the advantages of conversational AI, by reducing the cost of processing simple requests and providing a better experience to their callers: a personalized response, 24/7, with no hold time, even during call peaks. The Covid-19 crisis has accelerated the transition to cloud contact centers, due to an increase in customer queries as people began working from home. Calldesk's AI-powered voice agents provide an innovative solution to automate repetitive calls in contact centers, in order to manage call spikes, avoid long queue times, and continue to deliver the best customer experience. "We are excited to have Calldesk join the Talkdesk AppConnect partner community. Outstanding AI technology and industry expertise from Calldesk will strengthen and expand the Talkdesk offering," said John Youri, senior vice president, global channels and alliances.

Opentalk18, Talkdesk's CX industry event, was filled to the brim with sales and customer experience leaders from nearly every industry. Thousands of attendees joined experts in the sales, service and CX tracks to learn how they can start creating magic moments with their customers. One of these experts was Roy Raanani, CEO at Chorus.ai, a conversation intelligence platform for sales teams. His session, "The Impact of AI on Sales Meetings," highlights how businesses can transform their sales organizations through conversation analytics. The following are highlights from his Opentalk18 session.

Consumers loath the automated enterprise call center. Nothing is more frustrating than yelling into a phone at an interactive voice recognition (IVR) system that just doesn't seem to understand what you need. But few realize most enterprises aren't fans of current automated call center solutions either, often complaining that the technologies are complicated, expensive and frustrating for users. Part of the issue is call center technology has evolved slowly. Today, nearly 80% of the call center market is still on premise, according to Talkdesk.