The Era of Intelligent Assistance (IA) is upon us.

With a big boost from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg at F8 (his company’s get-together for developers), “bots” are poised to permeate the messaging platforms that link brands with their customers. In most cases, Opus Research would characterize such bots as a “minimum viable user interface product.” They won’t replace mobile apps or obligatory consultation with friends, family or contact center agents.

Yet, a small percentage of bots or IAs will succeed by playing the role of a ubiquitous, conversational user interface that enables individuals to use their own words to take control of devices, apps, digital services and even other, branded Intelligent Assistants that they use regularly.

IAs enable customers to navigate from place-to-place-to-cyberspace-and-back using their device-of-choice from their homes, autos or selected merchants. To do so with a minimum of friction and exposure to cyberfraud requires Intelligent Authentication (IAuth), an emerging opportunity area integrating platforms, protocols and practices that make the complex tasks associated with user identification and verifications strong, simple and seamless.

In April 2016, Opus Research convened a unique event showcase for both IA and IAuth solutions. IA-Squared featured presentations of the core technology platforms and how they are deployed by the likes of USAA, Virgin Media, Royal Dutch Shell, Ticketbis, Swedbank, MasterCard and MyWave.

In the case of MyWave, Founder and CEO Geraldine McBride delivered a conference-opening keynote that dramatized how important it is for companies to embrace Intelligent Assistants as mechanisms for making their transition to digital commerce. In addition, she sagely gave a shout out to IAuth, noting, “Highly sophisticated authentication is key – and must combine high security for the enterprise and the user while at the same time being fast and highly-automated for the user.”

Raghav Malik from MasterCard followed with a description MasterCard Identity Check™. As an ID verification service that is intuitive, low-friction, multi-factor and risk aware, it is designed to support both the ease-of-use and levels-of-trust that will be required to sustain digital commerce in a world with over 7 billion people and 30 billion “connected devices by 2020” (a figure attributed to Gartner). Taking the together, the two keynotes dramatized not only the benefits of mature IA and IAuth technologies for both individuals and brands , but also the fact that those technologies exist today and have proven their ability to scale up to anticipated volumes of data, individuals, activities and physical objects.

USAA Challenges Industry to Tackle the Hard Problems

The second day of the IA-Squared event started with a plenary keynote from Darrius Jones, AVP of Enterprise Innovation at USAA. For several years USAA has been the top rated company in the Tempkin Customer Service Ratings (TCSR) both for banking and insurance. According to Jones, long-standing investment in both IA and IAuth technologies figures prominently in attaining that status.

To be the financial services “provider of choice” to the military community, USAA has risen to the challenge of incorporating both IAuth and IA technologies to recognize and authenticate their members quickly and conveniently and then enable them to get questions answered or complete tasks by using a predictive, conversational interface. Their systems and customer care personnel anticipate the purpose of a contact and enable members to use their own words to take command of each session and interaction.

Jones delivered a chronology of recent technological “firsts” for USAA as it evolved its Intelligent Virtual Assistant. It started as the first U.S.-based financial institution to offer facial and voice recognition on a mobile app. Then it was the fastest to add Apple’s TouchID when it became generally available.

Next up for USAA are refinements to its IA, referred to as the USAA Call Assistant, that move into uncharted territory in the Customer Care terrain. IAs are evolving from “assistants” to “advisors” and then “advocates” on behalf of each member and his or her family. In the past, success had been measured in terms of questions answered and task completed. These problems could be solved by understanding the intent of the caller and matching it with answers or agents that already exist in the company’s knowledge base or contact center.

Jones asked: “But what do you do when you hear a question for the first time?” and noted that success in the future will be gauged by the ability to fulfill member requirements while recognizing that “Every member has a budget!” and “Every member has a plan!” Even if they do not say so specifically or, in many cases, want to recognize the constraints they have on spending or investing. It will call for looking across multiple data sources residing in multiple, departmental silos for answers and then arraying those answers in the member’s contextual lens and providing responses in a consistent manner, regardless of channel. That’s the power of natural language – whether spoken or in text form.

The challenges are manifold. When offering highly personalized services, each question is unique and, by definition, has never been asked before. And because USAA has so many lines of business and product offerings within those lines of business, recognizing the purpose of a contact, extracting meaning from the customer’s input and providing the proper response is hard. But, as Jones noted in paraphrasing JFK’s “Moon Speech”:

“We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication, Articles

Tags: Artificial Intelligence, intelligent Assistants, MasterCard, USAA, intelligent authenticatio