Is artificial intelligence (AI) just a buzzword?

AI World

AI ­– or artificial intelligence ­– has been a buzzword for the past few years, and we’re beginning to wonder if the industry is starting to tire of it. So, we headed to AI World in Boston to find out.

Now in its fourth year, AI World Conference and Expo is the industry’s largest independent business event focused on the state of the practice of AI in the enterprise. Three days of content, networking and opportunities to understand the complex landscape of AI business solutions. The conference and expo are designed to help businesses cut through the hype and navigate how to successfully deploy AI and intelligent automation.

The ‘need’ for artificial intelligence

Everyone seems to do “AI” these days, and everyone seems to want to say they use it in their business. It is clear that there is so much scope in utilising artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) as part of a solution or product. It seems that these days, to be a leading technology business you need to state that you do AI or machine learning at some point in your product development.

It’s important to understand why you need it and how you’re going to use it. At AI World, there were some extremely compelling talks on how businesses are truly utilising AI and ML to enhance their products, to their workflows and to ultimately improve the customer experience.

AI for real-world applications

Our main highlight was seeing our VP Products, Ian Firth talking about the future of customer voice in a digital world in the “building conversational applications” track. Ian discussed how due to the rise of AI-driven conversational experiences in the consumer realm, organizations must rethink the role of voice. He explained why now is the time to re-evaluate the role of voice as part of your organization’s omnichannel customer engagement strategy. Finally, Ian drew upon trends we have seen in the industry but also some examples of our customers that are already seeing results from integrating voice technology into their business strategies. Take a look at a clip from his talk below.

We also attended a talk by Tim Freeze, CMO at Interactions. As leaders in automated speech recognition (ASR) technology, we were interested in the solution and their research that demonstrated that consumers are showing a preference towards voice communications as we can talk 4x faster than we can type. Interactions are looking at the intent of their callers using conversational AI rather than just transcribing the spoken word. It is no longer just about the words that are said but how they are said and what the customer really needs from the interaction.

The future landscape

It was clear that the most successful AI solutions currently on the market are utilising voice at some point in the workflow and that is only going to increase as businesses understand how it can enhance their solutions.

Georgina Robertson, Speechmatics