One may forgive customer service technology users for laughing out loud at the suggestion of AI gaining sentience. They have a difficult time simply bringing their chatbots online to solve basic customer problems, let alone assigning them metaphysical characteristics. This comes as rogue ex-Google engineer Blake Lemoine said he believes that Google's LaMDA, a large language model in development, is sentient. While chatbot technology is evolving, the bots available in today's market are nowhere near sentient, according to a panel of contact center technology users and other experts. Much more work needs to be done to make customer service chatbots integrate with existing enterprise IT to automate even the simplest tasks.

Now more than ever, we are seeing digital transformation at the most progressive institutions moving beyond mobile banking upgrades and modest changes in back office technologies to becoming organization-wide initiatives. With budgets increasing and new advanced technologies being implemented, ownership of the digital transformation process at leading banks and credit unions is moving up the organizational chart, with the more digitally mature institutions having the process led by the the CEO or even the board of directors. We are also seeing greater cross-functional engagement across market-leading institutions. Understanding how leading organizations are managing their digital transformation process is more important than ever to the future competitiveness of banks and credit unions of all sizes. Unfortunately, as we found in the area of innovation, a surprisingly small number of financial institutions (12%) consider themselves to be digital transformation'leaders', with 34% considering themselves to be'fast followers' and 55% stating they were either'mainstream players' or'laggards'.

Ask tech analysts for a digital transformation definition and many will have a quick one at the ready. In the trenches of businesses struggling to automate processes with AI, analytics and rules-based engines, there's less spoken of digital transformation and more about bottom-line results -- one project at a time. Without passing judgment on the accuracy of IDC's, Forrester Research's and Gartner's digital transformation definitions (see "Leading analyst firms describe digital transformation"), it's easy to agree they're all convincingly vague. In the content management sphere, the meaning of the term digital transformation can lean toward making content from all corners of the enterprise accessible to all users, subdivided to just the snippet of text and graphics that an employee or customer needs at the time -- and nothing more -- dynamically rendered to the device in use. But whatever the true meaning of digital transformation, customers and vendors at the PegaWorld 2018 user conference in Las Vegas had difficultly agreeing on, or even expressing, how to define this shopworn tech expression in the real world, where actual CFOs approve real budget spending on technology that affects everyday workflow.

This past week more than 5,000 people made their way to Las Vegas to learn that the biggest bet they need to place has nothing to do with casino games. It's a bet that will help business with their processes, workflows and the customer experience (CX). PegaWorld is the annual Pegasystems user conference where people representing companies from all over the world learn about the latest and greatest updates to the Pega applications that are helping to run their businesses, and I was honored to be invited to not just attend, but speak at the event. By the way, the robots I mentioned aren't the machines you might see on a manufacturing assembly line or something that looks like R2D2 from Star Wars that wheels around and takes care of simple physical tasks. These robots, otherwise known as robotic process automation (RPA), are the software applications that automatically take care of routine tasks you perform on your computer.

Pegasystems has announced the launch of Pega Infinity, a digital transformation software suite. Infinity is the first platform to connect front end customer experiences to back end process automation, and represents Pega's largest ever product launch, according to the company. The announcement was made overnight at Pegasystems annual user conference, Pegaworld, in Las Vegas. The new suite enhances Pega's customer engagement applications and digital process automation platform. According to Pega, the new suite will allow organisations to accelerate their transformation projects to "continuously exceed their customers' expectations".

Move over Pega CRM Suite, Pega Infinity is here. That was the big announcement at PegaWorld 2018 this morning. In March 2017, CMO Tom Libretto told me that Pega, the global BPM and "operational excellence" leader was putting CRM first. In those 15 months, the space and the technology have evolved so fast that the term CRM just doesn't cover it any more. As Pega CTO Don Schuerman told me, in a press briefing yesterday, "You can't deploy a new customer experience solution without automating the process behind that. The lines between traditional CRM, traditional BPM apps, and robotic automation will continue to blur."