Chris Ezekiel founded Creative Virtual over 13 years ago in London’s East End. At the time, virtual agents were still a relatively unknown technology. If anyone used the term “chatbot” it was most likely in reference to eccentric experiments such as Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA. Very few people envisioned a world where natural language-based automated systems would underpin customer service and even drive commerce.

Fast forward to April 2017 and Ezekiel’s Creative Virtual is none other than the recipient of the prestigious Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the Innovation category. The Queen’s Award is one of the highest honors a UK business can receive. In order to be selected as a recipient in the Innovation category a business must demonstrate “outstanding innovation, continued over at least 2 years, or continuous innovation and development over at least 5 years” according to the Queen’s Awards for Enterprise Press Book.

Ezekiel has taken his vision for a world propelled by natural language and intelligent assistance and transformed it into a successful company powering the customer service engines of dozens of major businesses around the globe. The company’s V-Person virtual assistant and V-Portal analytics platform offer a full suite of services to power automated customer self-service across web, mobile, SMS, messaging platforms and social media.

Creative Virtual’s well-deserved recognition with the Queen’s Award illustrates the upward trajectory of intelligent assistance over that past decade. Pioneers such as Ezekiel founded companies prior to recent major technological leaps in NLP and speech recognition. Back in those early days, knowledge was mostly hand-scripted in a time consuming process. The power of virtual agents to understand user intent was limited.

While some early pioneers dropped out of the picture, those with staying power were rewarded for their obstinance with breakthroughs in machine learning, process automation, and a flare-up in popularity for the conversational UI. Here we are in 2017 surrounded by voice assistants, chatbots, and a newfound respect for all things related to intelligent assistance.

Opus Research congratulates Chris Ezekiel and the entire team at Creative Virtual for their receipt of the Queen’s Award for Business – Innovation 2017. The age of intelligent assistance has dawned and we look forward to continued progress in all aspects of the technology and its many applications.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: intelligent Assistants, chatbots, Creative Virtual, innovation