As the year comes to a close, I’d like to take the time to reflect upon 2017 and highlight our expectations for 2018 and beyond. I’ll start with a big “Thank You” to the firms and individuals who have turned to Opus Research for advice and consulting services, as well as those who have attended our events, Webcasts and conferences.

It’s been gratifying to watch the mix of attendees morph from largely technologists and futurists talking tech with one another to marketing, sales, contact center and other business unit execs sharing deployment-related experiences. Executives from commercial banks and credit unions, insurance companies and investment firms were joined by top brands in beverages, car making, retailing, home entertainment, mobile communications, shipping, cosmetics and athletic gear. We well know that brands are moving at light speed to develop and deploy along message bots, chatbots, virtual agents or all of the above.

Opus Research is especially grateful to the solutions providers that have sponsored our events, Webcasts and research activities, including ASAPP, Artificial Solutions, Aspect, Automat.ai, Botanic Technologies, Contact Solutions, CXCompany, Datacom, Discourse.ai, Flamingo, Interactions, IPSoft, Kasisto, MasterCard, Next IT, NICE, Nuance Communications, Omilia, Sabio, Samsung, Soleo, Synthetix, Uniphore/ Collectively, they have developed software, services and solutions that simplify and accelerate the complex processes involved in on-boarding, training, monitoring, operating and administering the fast-evolving community of digital employees.

Five “Known Knowns” To Watch For In 2018

As we enter 2018, it’s clear that solution providers and practitioners are more in balance than ever before and that the number of “known knowns” is growing rapidly. Here are five examples:

#1 Intelligent Assistants (IAs) can do a lot right out of the box – Even if you are not Google, Facebook or other giants that benefit from exposure to inconceivably large data sets, solution providers have a history of FAQs, recordings, call detail records (CDRs), chat transcripts, product literature, CRM records and even interactive voice response (IVR) scripts to inform IAs on the basic intents of customers in the top vertical categories. Big Data is not required to get started.

#2 Humans have long-term value in onboarding, training and tuning – IA’s have a near immediate negative impact on operating costs and positive impact on customer satisfaction, but their ability to replace live agents and assistants is vastly overrated. To the contrary, the need to monitor and constantly tune responses to keep them relevant and satisfactory to prospects and customers is growing and will be the source of new types of jobs and permanent employment.

#3 Managing true conversations comes next – Categorization? √ Understanding?√ Conversation? Not-so-fast! Some solution providers are better than others at recognizing context, promoting turn-taking, and allowing for a customer’s mind to wander and jump around topics, but the game board is still largely governed by statistics and branches on logic trees that can come up empty. When that happens, IA’s are no better than poorly designed, frustrating IVR apps. Watch for some real advancements to correct this situation in 2018.

#4 Hurdling the walled gardens of #ConvComm – It’s a shame that the branded Big Four (and others) have elected to create separate and unequal “platforms” for messaging bots and #VoiceFirst agents. Brands would like to see Intelligent Assistance infrastructure that lets them develop a service once and have it render correctly on all devices and in all modes. Instead, in the short-to-medium term, we are stuck with the same, duplicated efforts that plague mobile apps (iOS versus Android – and a few, lesser others). Separate staffs maintain the code-base for Alexa skills versus Google actions, Facebook Messenger bots – and a few, lesser others).

#5 Reaching beyond our grasp – Now that we’ve tackled the “known knowns,” we can expect start-ups and stealthy entrepreneurs to emerge in 2018 to tackle “known unknowns” (blending Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Knowledge Management and other elements of AI with the human touch) and to expose and exploit the “unknown knowns” (their nature is “to be determined”, but there is always room for break-through technologies). At the very minimum solutions will span the traditional lines of demarcation between customer care, marketing, user ID and authentication and relationship management platforms.

Adoption and use is about to accelerate in 2018. Forces are aligning for people to employ conversational technologies at home, in their cars and in their offices. It’s up to solution providers to manage the complexity of underlying processes to keep it simple for end-users and enterprises alike.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants