Late September, the 4th Intelligent Assistants Conference took place in San Francisco. Over the years, this conference has become a flagship event for the space, combining experience sharing from users and panel discussions with vendors. Presentations have just been posted. We took the opportunity of the conference to update our market landscape. We continued to wrestle with weeding out scripted bots and preserve our focus on conversational assistants.

How long do you think it will be until virtually all tier 1 call center agents are replaced by AI bots? I addressed this a bit in my Machine Learning session at last year's Business Communications Summit. I've been discussing the topic with my colleague Dave Michels, and we agree that the impact of artificial intelligence on contact center operations will be significant. Chatbots are the first step, but automated bots that naturally interact with callers will initially reduce and eventually eliminate all but the most complex human agent interactions during the next decade. The industry has arrived at a formidable convergence of natural language processing, speech synthesis, machine learning, and declining compute costs that will make it possible to produce outstanding customer service outcomes from AI bots within the next five years – if not sooner.

The bot space has been changing rapidly. A few years ago, bots were automated chat agents. They would aim at replacing customer service representatives in case of traffic spikes or when all were busy. Very rudimentary, they usually left consumers frustrated. Bots are now enjoying an incredible momentum.