AI and Machinelearning in 2017 – What to Expect
2016 has been the year of Artificial Intelligence and machinelearning. With the year being almost at an end, let me chime in to the gang of pundits who venture into prediction land and pronounce what we get out of our glass balls. So here are my 5 plus 2 bonus ones. AI gets mainstream in Consumer Environments Alexa paved the way, the Google Assistant is on its heels, Microsoft Cortana wants to get there, too – and Apple, amazingly, is a late starter in this environment. Amazon started with a pretty smart strategy by not overselling the capabilities of its underlying AI, as Apple did with Siri, which caused some grief for Apple and some laughs for many people around. More and more helpful Alexa skills are developed and implemented that improve its usefulness. Similarly Google; they started late but are in the game now, too – following a different strategy of adding new functionality by just making it available in contrast to Amazon, who opt to have users individually enable ‘skills’. Identification of what these systems can do will be an interesting question. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg created a butler for his house, who he calls Jarvis, like the one of Tony Stark in the Ironman movies. Google recently based its translation engine on machinelearning and AI, seeing vastly improved translations. Facebook’s translations base on an AI, too – although this one still seems to have a lot to learn. Not to mention all the countless other consumer services Google has, that utilize machinelearning and AIs in the background. Two of the main developments to look at here are...
Why the Phone is Dead – And How to Accommodate for It
As our (digital) lives circle more and more around mobility, and consequently the mobile phone, the questions around communication-, and in particular around service- and support channels become more interesting by the day. Facebook triggered what can be dubbed a little revolution when opening its messaging platform for chatbots in 2016; meanwhile even Skype offers chatbot support. It is safe to say that chatbots have been one of the main technology trends in 2016. Slack, originally released only mid of 2013, has become one of the main collaboration- and communications platforms. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning in various flavors and strengths have become part of many business applications throughout business’s value chains. And the combination of conversational user interfaces and AI/machine learning has the potential of changing the way people interact with businesses (and data, for what it is worth in this context). Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, to name only the big players, offer voice driven digital assistants, which already now provide a hint of new engagement models between customers and companies. Intelligent, conversational systems are what we are about to see, first predominantly using chat-like user interfaces, then also merging voice into the mix, first to cover isolated situations, then increasingly for more complicated ones. Some Data Points Business Insider reported in September that the usage of chat apps has surpassed the usage of social media, measured in monthly active users. Additionally, Google found already in 2014 that 59 per cent of smartphone owners globally install games within a week of getting the phones, which is a higher percentage than any other type of app. On the...
Kustomer – A New Kid on the Customer Service Block
Sparked by an article by Bob Thompson, titled You had me at “Treat Customers as People” about Kustomer, a new kid on the customer service block, I ventured to reach out to founder Brad Birnbaum and his team to get some more information. After all the customer quadrant of software is quite crowded, and a new company needs to offer good ideas to keep up and go beyond the incumbents, most of them being young companies as well. One of the basic questions that I had was: Do we need another customer service solution? After all, G2Crowd already lists 19 in their Help Desk grid; and these are only the ones that made it into the grid. Overall G2Crowd counts 78 solutions, excluding Kustomer. And quite some of them are quite strong. Figure 1: G2Crowd Grid for Help Desks as of December 2016 Brad and his team certainly seem to be of the opinion that there is an unmet need; as are their investors who brought in $ 12.5 million into seed- and series A funding in less than a year. The founders bring experience that dates back to 1996 and includes the success of Assistly, now desk.com, which is part of Salesforce. Another question is: How does Kustomer want to differentiate itself or, which issue do they solve that the other companies do not yet solve. Quite simply put, Kustomer claims that there are too many unconnected point solutions that customers – and hence employees – need to deal with. This issue gets addressed by the Kustomer platform that acts as an integration hub and connects customer service...