Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence is a major topic today, not just in communications and Contact Centers, but across business. Most of the current crop of business-focused “AI” is in fact Machine Learning (ML). In ML, a large data set is used to “train” the algorithm to predict an outcome based on a range of interacting variables. Using modern data sets that have millions and even billions of test sets and thousands of variables, the ML program is able to train a neural network to predict an outcome.

It’s not often that you get to attend a conference in Ireland and stay in a castle, but analysts at the recent Genesys Analyst Summit got to experience both the wonderful hospitality of the Irish while staying at the lovely Ashford Castle near Galway. Galway was an appropriate locale, as Genesys has a major presence in the city thanks to its acquisition of Altocloud.

Last week Cisco held its annual Contact Center Sales Summit in Hollywood, Florida. This year's gathering of product managers, sales overlays, channels, and technology partners increased in size by 50% and, for the first time, included some customers. Cisco collaboration applications business grew 15% last fiscal year, a noticeable uplift over the previous ones. It gave the company the opportunity to share its ambitions for its contact center product line.

Image credit: Shift in the playing field by Ranganath Krishnamani, spinning top

In part 1 of the series, we looked at technologies for self-service and customer interaction over the various channels. In this second part, I would like to cover process and analytics, the two other layers of the landscape.

Here’s my main message from last week’s conference in Newark – the future of voice has nothing to do with telephony.

In fact, the future of voice has nothing to do with telephony, and it doesn’t have much to do with PCs or mobile phones either.

These are the cornerstones of the business communications world we know so well, so how can this be? What’s left?