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Businesses are increasingly discovering the opportunities of conversational interfaces. Intelligent assistance is a natural fit for interfaces that use natural language. At the low end of the capability spectrum, automated intelligent assistants, aka chatbots, can be trained to answer a broad range of frequently asked questions. At the higher end of the spectrum, intelligent assistants can help customers complete meaningful business transactions.
To make the leap from simple chatbot to helpful advisor, intelligent assistants require deep expertise in a specific business domain. Accordingly, we’re seeing a trend where solution providers focus their technology on tackling narrow subject areas. A use case that’s often cited these days is X.ai’s automated scheduling assistant. As Tobias Goebel, from Aspect, noted in a recent Medium post, that Amy (or Andrew), the intelligent assistant, doesn’t have a broad set of capabilities. But she/he is extremely proficient at scheduling meetings. The same premise holds true for Edward, Aspects text-based concierge for Radisson’s Blue Edwardian hotels.
Kasisto Homes in on Banking and Finance
Kasisto is an intelligent assistant platform provider with a solid pedigree, having spun off from SRI International in 2014. The company has been leveraging its deep set of artificial intelligence tools, including speech recognition, natural language understanding, and natural language generation, to create customer-facing conversational assistants.
Rather than building a generic chatbot platform and targeting lots of industries, the team at Kasisto focused on creating an intelligent assistant tailored for the banking and finance industry. They constructed a data set rich in banking terms and processes that could be leveraged by the platform. To showcase the result and help prove to banks that customers are eager to adopt helpful automated banking bots, Kasisto deployed MyKai on Facebook Messenger.
Concentrating on banking seems to have been an effective strategy for Kasisto. The company recently raised over $9M in a Series A funding round as their client list continues to expand.
Elafris Creates an Insurance-Savvy Chatbot
As if to confirm the trend towards verticalization, a press release just this week announced a partnership between Jupiter Auto and Elafris. Elafris provides intelligent conversational bots tailored specifically to the insurance industry.
In a series of videos available on their website, Elafris showcases how a customer can interact with their automated insurance advisor to receive quick quotes, check on the status of claims, ask for roadside assistance, or handle payments. The conversational interface appears to be extremely effective in dispositioning the various customer’s requests. This type of interaction is only possible if the assistant has access to a deep ruleset comprising key functions and processes of the insurance industry.
As more businesses tap into the benefits of intelligent assistance on conversational platforms, we are likely to see new players spring up to tackle key verticals. At the same time, major solution providers who have been on the scene for years continue to build out their own industry specific knowledge bases. Competition will continue to be strong, but there’s no doubt that opportunities abound for those with a solid understanding of how businesses work.
Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants
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Whatever you call them – IA, virtual agents, bots, chatbots, conversational agents, robots…they are a great channel for communicating with your customers. Having spent three years immersed in the technology; trying different approaches…it is clear that when deployed correctly they can clearly solved customer and vendor pain points.
Put aside those that are just there to drive traffic or increase “foot fall” on messaging platforms or simply automate – where the REAL interest lies is that of creating opportunity. And that is with selling, in the biggest electronic commerce sector – that being B2B. Where its about:
1. Ensuring the customer finds the best product or solution?
2. Actually buying it from the vendor?
3. Offering complementary items
There is a lot of talk about the underlying technologies – natural language processing, machine learning, expert systems etc etc – some of which have been around for years, just looking for a real problem to solve. After extensively testing, some actually work but don’t really match user preferred behaviour (like natural language processing). Others are still looking for a home.
Its not about technology du jour, its about solving real customer pain points. My bet’s on Ecommerce in B2B…
Hi Rob: Good advice! There are a number of “pain points” that Intelligent Assistants can address. Today, decision makers are confronted with a number of options and first must choose when and how to deploy new technologies to better serve their customers and support their employees at the same time. We’re here to separate hype from reality and I think we make it clear that, in many ways, we are not dealing with “bleeding edge” technologies. Still, the whole area is infused with hype and confusion which, together, have given prospective deployers some pause. I agree that “Ecommerce B2B” has tremendous attraction, but I also see it as one of many areas where well designed intelligent assistants can have an impact.