Artificial Intelligence (AI)

At the event, we heard from CEO Paul Segre, who proudly announced that the integration with Interactive Intelligence was completed at the end of September, and they are now moving together as one company.

Verint Systems Inc. has announced the addition of new automation and artificial intelligence capabilities to its Workforce Management (WFM) solution. With these new capabilities, users can use voice-controlled digital personal assistants, and automatically perform schedule-related tasks from their mobile devices.

Two years ago, everything was about mobility, and last year was all about the cloud. Those uber-trends are still with us, with a lot of runway left, but there’s something bigger in the room now – Artificial Intelligence. Of course, these trends are connected – especially in the collaboration space – so we have to pay attention to all of them. Each is relevant to collaboration in its own way, but it’s interesting to note how they’re getting increasingly abstract, and that doesn’t make UC-related buying decisions any easier.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is clearly one of the hottest topics these days, and I recently had the opportunity to see and hear about some of the things the Cisco Collaboration Group is doing in this area. At a recent Cisco “AI Meets Collaboration” event for press and analysts with Cisco’s Emerge Lab, the company discussed how it’s using AI to “improve the way our customer’s employees work together.”

As San Francisco was invaded by well over 100,000 attendees to Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference, it was hard not to be overwhelmed. The sheer size of the crowds walking to and from the various venues throughout the city, plus the number of sessions (2700!), the festival atmosphere with bands, DJs, activities including a climbing wall, and name-brand speakers including Michelle Obama, Ashton Kutcher, Natalie Portman, Jenna Bush Hager, Barbara Pierce Bush, and more, made for a very different type of conference experience. 

The “fact” that we stand to lose the artificial intelligence (AI) race to the Chinese, Russians, North Koreans, et al seems omnipresent in tech media buzz these days. It has jumped into national discourse because of its centrality to cyber war preparedness. While I appreciate our need in the U.S. to “win,” I am circumspect about AI hyperventilation and its touch tool, BOTs. 

NICE inContact has announced a new release of its CXone customer experience platform. The Summer 2017 release integrates analytics-based omnichannel routing, workforce optimization, analytics, automation, and artificial intelligence, each of which is built on an Open Cloud Foundation.

Just as the cloud was the trend du jour last year, it’s AI’s turn in 2017, and taken together, there’s a lot of disruption happening in the collaboration space. That ground has been well-covered here at BCStrategies, and we’ll be doing more of the same at our upcoming BC Summit. While it’s fun to pick through the many disruption scenarios, what decision-makers really want to know is where the opportunities lie.