The month of May has brought with it a number of executive moves and company acquisitions with direct bearing on Conversational Commerce. Cisco acquired Accompany, a startup whose core product is termed a “Virtual Assistant” by some accounts and, perhaps more accurately, an “adaptive virtual chief of staff.” A very important aspect to the acquisition is the appointment of Accompany’s co-founder and CEO Amy Chang to be the Vice President in charge of the company’s collaboration efforts.

In that capacity, Chang is taking on one of the roles of Rowan Trollope, an executive that joined the Cisco team in 2012 to pilot collaboration, but had recently added responsibility initiatives surrounding interconnection and integration of the smart endpoints that comprise the Internet of Things. Trollope has decided to leave Cisco and assume the role of CEO at Five9, a cloud-based contact center service provider whose $200 million top line and $8 million loss (in 2017) stands in stark contrast to Cisco’s $48 billion in revenue and $10 billion in net income. Although frequent change in executive ranks has characterized both companies.

The personal journeys of Trollope and Chang, respectively, are emblematic of the tactical and strategic choices confronting enterprise executives in charge of procuring technology to support digital transformation, customer experience and collaboration. There is a very interesting angle to the Accompany acquisition that introduces conversational intelligence into the Enterprise Collaboration space. This is traditionally an area where sales and marketing organizations take the lead. If Cisco is able to effectively integrate Accompany type technology into WebEx and meetings, then the buyer moves slowly away from IT and infrastructure towards lines and business.

Pause for a Pop Quiz

#1: What’s the next XaaS? Analytics as a Service? Collaboration as a Service? AI as a Service? How about “all of the above?”

#2: What is the next candidate for “BYO” status? Bring Your Own Identity (BYOID) and Bring Your Own Artificial Intelligence (BYOAI), which should better be known as Bring Your Own Bot (Whoops, BYOB is already taken).

Reminder: In the enterprise world BYOD (bring your own device) exposed cracks in the corporate security perimeter ten years ago whenever a C-level executive wanted to be able to receive email on his (or her) smartphone. This democratization of IT has spawned a minor BYO mania.

#3: What sort of company should you choose to provide your Conversational Commerce platform? A firm with a long legacy in enterprise IT infrastructure spanning IVRs, contact centers, data centers and IP networking? A small, growth company that serves as a software platform for call processing, voice processing, information processing and connections to huge amounts of data and artificial intelligence? An established cloud-based company with all of the tools and “uptime” to support contact centers, collaboration, voice processing, Big Data and Analytics?

By the way, that last category sounds an awful lot like the sweet spot for Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google.

Intelligent Assistance Reaches its Architectural Adolescence

We’ve entered that “uncomfortable stage” of Conversational Commerce’s technology maturity curve. Enterprise IT and Telecom infrastructure has moved to “The Cloud” at the same time that individual humans are walking around with impressive amounts of computing power and digital memory of their own. Add home and automotive electronics to the mix, along with a slew of cameras, microphones and other sensors that comprise the Internet of Things (IoT) and you’ll see the necessity to sort out options rationally to leverage the capabilities offered by the full-range of solutions providers with cloud-based, premises-based, and hybrid solutions in their bag of tricks.

Lost in “XaaS versus BYOxx” discussions is an angle that is largely unspoken: Where do the privacy rights of employees fit within all of the current public debates and discourse? Does GDPR have a business user angle? What tools, including personal virtual agents, will be provided to business users to enable them to opt-out of the capabilities being put forth by Accompany and the many others (DiscoverOrg, ClearBit, Zoominfo, Gryphon, Linkedin – just to name a few).

Meanwhile, key technology components are being rendered as commodities. Speech recognition, for instance, has become quite accurate. Text-to-speech resources are getting tremendously life-like. Machine Learning platforms are striking a balance with humans – who are sometimes trainers and sometimes beneficiaries. Banks, retailers, airlines and a number of other large companies with lots at stake, are growing comfortable incorporating these components to encourage or facilitate conversations between and among customers and employees.

Keep up with Accelerating Change

During this time of uncertainty, one thing is certain: Leaders in Financial Services, Retailing, Packaged Goods, Technology and telecom aggressively incorporating IA technologies into sales, marketing, customer support and employee collaboration fabric. In effect, they are voting with their investment decisions, and have exposed some winning approaches. Rather than investing in general “Conversational AI”, they choose use cases and approaches that center on platforms capable of rapidly recognizing and correctly responding to issues at hand (termed “categories” and “intents”) from either text or voice input. They put Natural Language Understanding and Conversational Resources in the center, but also make Knowledge Management Machine Learning key.

The number of exemplary use cases and case studies is growing and the pace of adoption is accelerating. The next big innovation could be the result of R&D efforts at Cisco, Amazon, Google or Microsoft. They may be put into practice at cloud services specialists like Five9, Interactions or Avaya. And it leaves a role for emerging, innovative companies like Accompany to be a source of new services and executive personnel. At Opus Research we urge you to watch this space for up-to-date information about successful implementations and the executive decisions that are shaping the future of IA.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Articles