Opus Research’s Conversational Commerce Conference San Francisco (Sept 12-13) was designed to help organizations unlock the power of machine learning, natural language processing, AI, continuous authentication and intelligent assistance.

Participating speakers for Conversational Commerce Conference San Francisco included leading global brands & enterprises — Autodesk, John Chambers, Google, Esurance, Alight Solutions, Best Buy, Chris Messina, VIP Shop, Dell, Albertsons Companies, and others — showcasing real-world implementations of Conversational Commerce across multiple vertical industries.

Sponsors included: Nuance Communications, Verint, Uniphore, VUI Inc., Daisee, Rancard, Helpshift, Jacada, DiscourseAI, Aerendir Mobile Inc., Creative Virtual, Fortr3ss, Aspect, Speechmorphing, Flamingo AI, and WitLingo.

Below please find featured presentations, access to transcripts and audio highlights (thanks to Voicera), and customer case studies from Conversational Commerce Conference (Four Seasons Hotel San Francisco, Sept. 12-13).

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

1:00 PM  –  1:15 PM
Welcome: Conversational Commerce Conference San Francisco 2018
Hosted by Opus Research, C3 San Francisco will go beyond the AI hype to define specific ways in which today’s solutions providers can help businesses and brands enable Conversational Commerce for Customer Service with digital self-service strategies that incorporate bots, virtual agents, digital employees and intelligent authentication.

1:15 PM  –  2:00 PM
Featured Keynote: Voice, Big Data and Conversational AI
What attracted the former CEO of one of the world’s largest enterprise IT infrastructure companies to the world of Speech Analytics, Intelligent Assistance and Conversational Commerce? Are brands and businesses ready to integrate AI-infused resources, such as speech analytics, natural language processing and other flavors of machine learning? What challenges need to be overcome, technologically and organizationally?
Speakers:
John Chambers, Founder & CEO @JohnTChambers
Umesh Sachdev, CEO & Co-founder @Umesh_Sachdev
Dan Miller, Lead Analyst & Founder, Opus Research
If you would like to have access to the recording and highlights from this session, click here

2:00 PM  –  2:30 PM
Case Study: Alight Solutions
A leading provider of outsourced benefits administration and cloud-based HR and financial solutions, Alight Solutions has transformed its web self-service experience using chatbot and Conversational AI technology that understands the questions and needs of millions of different users, in their own words. Leveraging Verint’s Intelligent Virtual Assistant™ (IVA), the new self-service system handled over 760,000 interactions, marking up to a 67 percent reduction of live chat engagements in the call center over the previous year.
Speaker:
Ibrahim Khoury, Director of Product Development and Innovation, Alight Solutions
If you would like to have access to the recording and highlights from this session, click here

2:30 PM  –  3:00 PM
Panel: Charting Your Path to Conversations at Scale
From webchat to bots, messaging and “VoiceFirst” strategies, there is no slow down in the technological capabilities being offered. If you blinked, you may have missed a step. In this panel, we discuss which steps are required, which technologies can be skipped? If a human cannot do it, what makes you think it can be automated? Are all your systems in order? This panel will key in on what is required and what is not – and we may not all agree!
Speakers:
Richard Kimber, CEO & Co-Founder, Daisee
Linda Crawford, CEO, Helpshift
Tobias Goebel, VP, Product Marketing, Sparkcentral
Marina Kalika, Sr. Director, Marketing, Nuance
Nicolas de Kouchkovsky, Principal, CaCube Consulting
If you would like to have access to the recording and highlights from this session, click here

3:20 PM  –  3:50 PM
Panel: “Voice-First” Conversational Commerce
As “Voice-First” personal intelligent assistants (Amazon Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, Bixby) continue to proliferate, people will use their own words to take command of their personal AI. This paradigm is fundamentally changing the relationship between how businesses interact with customers and unhooking the direct link between brands and consumers.
Speakers:
Katie McMahon, VP & GM, SoundHound, Inc.
Giuseppe (Pino) Di Fabbrizio, Co-Founder & CTO, VUI, Inc.
Oren Jacob, CEO& Co-founder, PullString
Dan Miller, Lead Analyst & Founder, Opus Research
If you would like to have access to the recording and highlights from this session, click here

3:50 PM  –  4:20 PM
Panel: The Art of Conversation: Enterprise Edition
When customers engage in voice and text conversations with brands and enterprises, there is a treasure trove of valuable data. Conversational analytics tools help understand intents, identify bottlenecks, and segment conversations. This panel of experts outline the specific business needs necessary to increase user engagement though analytics services and how to design a conversational user interface that is complex, robust and accurate
Speakers:
Jonathan Eisenzopf, CEO, discourse.ai
Ofer Ronen, General Manager, Chatbase
David Wiener, Chief Product Officer, Voicera
Derek Top, Director of Research, Opus Research
If you would like to have access to the recording and highlights from this session, click here

4:20 PM  –  4:50 PM
Featured Case Study: Autodesk
This session highlights some of the benefits that an intelligeqnt assistant can bring to customer service by showcasing the creation and evolution of the Autodesk Virtual Agent (AVA), while also accentuating some key dialog design learnings and corresponding strategies, methods, and best practices. AVA has reduced time-to-resolution by 99% from an average of 1.5 days to under 5 minutes, and helps over 1,200 customers per day, with an average 85% customer satisfaction rating.
Speakers:
River Hain Lead Solutions Analyst, Autodesk
Yizel Vizcarra, Conversation Engineer, Autodesk
View Presentation
If you would like to have access to the recording and highlights from this session, click here

4:50 PM  –  5:00 PM
Conversational Commerce Awards (CCA) Ceremony
Since 2014, Opus Research awards have showcased real-world implementations of conversational user interfaces for customer engagement, digital commerce, self-service, employee assistance, and intelligent devices. A panel of expert judges will announce this year’s three winners.

Thursday, September 13, 2018
 
9:00 AM  –  9:30 AM
Keynote Panel: A Higher Calling for Conversational Commerce and Brands
We humans have already digitized our existence. Brands are trying to keep up. Both face challenges when overcoming traditional technological and organizational containers, like contact centers, websites, messaging platforms and mobile apps in order to foster conversational relationships with both clients and prospects. Where to start, how to leverage existing personal and infrastructure are the first order concerns to be addressed in this panel.
Speakers:
Chris Messina, Product Designer, Technologist
Mitch Lieberman, Conversational Intelligence, Opus Research
Dan Miller, Lead Analyst & Founder, Opus Research
If you would like to have access to the recording and highlights from this session, click here

9:30 AM  –  10:00 AM
Featured Keynote: Nuance & Esurance
Simply deploying a piece of software in your digital channels won’t magically increase your revenue. It’s a mix of great technology, understanding the customer and continuously analyzing the goals in order to optimize the experience. Hear from Nuance VP of WW Marketing, George Skaff who will be featuring Janine Belvini, Manager of Digital Products at Esurance talking about their journey with Nuance and how they achieved their desired ROI by combining a virtual assistant with live engagements as part of their digital transformation strategy.
Speakers:
Janine Belvini, Digital Product Manager – Chat & Virtual Assistant, Esurance
George Skaff, VP of Worldwide Marketing, Nuance
View Presentation
If you would like to have access to the recording and highlights from this session, click here

10:00 AM  –  10:25 AM
Case Study: Conversational Design and Beyond
Conversation design builds natural language behaviors into voice and multimodal interactions. Hear how the principles and process of conversation design are used by Google Assistant to create successful, compelling voice-driven interactions.
Speaker:
Cathy Pearl, Head of Conversation Design Outreach, Google
If you would like to have access to the recording and highlights from this session, click here

10:45 AM  –  11:10 AM
Featured Case Study: VIP Shop, Chatbots in China
AI is on the rise in China with tremendous growth in chatbot activities and conversational technology development, powered by BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent). In this exclusive featured case study, VIPShop, a global leader in flash sales platform and the third largest online retailer in China, will demonstrate how in the past two years it has deployed the classic FAQ bot, after-sales task bot, recommendation bots, FinBot (financial services bot) and a bot platform for VIP Marketplace.
Speaker:
Huiyan Huang, AI Team Director, VIPShop
View Presentation
If you would like to have access to the recording and highlights from this session, click here

11:30 AM  –  12:00 PM
Panel: From E-Commerce to Conversational Commerce
Enterprises use printed catalogs, Web sites, mobile apps and even videos to guide prospects and customers through searching, shopping, configuration, shipping and support of their products and services. Now Intelligent Assistants are making those processes into conversations, giving rise to questions like: Do my existing materials support IA? How do I avoid replicating processes that work for each new bot or virtual agent? How to I transform my e-commerce investments into conversational assets?
Speakers:
Rich Hultman, Senior UX Designer, Best Buy
Monica Chartier, Program Manager, Chat & Mobile, Dell
Prince Arora, Director of Digital Product Management, Albertsons Companies
Kofi Dadzie, CEO & Co-Founder, Rancard
Dan Miller, Lead Analyst & Founder, Opus Research
If you would like to have access to the recording and highlights from this session, click here

12:00 PM  –  12:30 PM
Panel: Seamless Secure Experience Through “4th Factor” Continuous Authentication
Led by experts, this session discusses the capabilities of digital federated identity initiatives and the evolution from single, enterprise-based authentication mechanisms to continuous, distributed ID&V activities across industries. Learn how multi-modal, multi-factor authentication systems improve the growth and scalability of intelligent
assistance.
Speakers:
Alexey Khitrov, President, ID R&D
Deepak Dutt, CEO, Zighra
Matt Whipple, Principal Specialist, Security and Biometrics, Nuance
Martin Zizi, Founder, Aerendir Mobile Inc.
Ravin Sanjith, Intelligent Authentication, Opus Research
If you would like to have access to the recording and highlights from this session, click here

1:30 PM  –  2:00 PM
Case Study Panel: USAA
USAA is a world-renowned insurance and banking leader in CX and digital initiatives, and early adopter in driving virtual and human assistance, biometrics and analytics. The team leaders will share their wisdom in building a business case , determining the measurable outcomes, and identifying the challenges and opportunities in creating a cross-channel platform for virtual agents.
Speakers:
Perry Greer, Lead Digital Product Manager, USAA
Dan Miller, Lead Analyst & Founder, Opus Research
Derek Top, Director of Research, Opus Research
If you would like to have access to the recording and highlights from this session, click here

2:00 PM  –  2:45 PM
Panel: How Conversational Intelligence Drives Exceptional Experiences
Conversational Intelligence plays a critical role in helping organizations to both decide what conversations to have and how to best have those conversations. The goal is to have the right conversations and direct that conversation toward optimal customer outcomes. Top platform providers recognize the need to keep people in the digital commerce equation; there is also a system versus human balance discussion; Bot, human assist and/or employee assist. How should best-in-class organizations consider the role of conversational intelligence within their organization?
Speakers:
Larry Augustin, CEO, SugarCRM
Tatyana Kanzaveli, Founder & CEO, Open Health Network
Mark Floisand, Chief Marketing Officer, Coveo
Mitch Lieberman, Conversational Intelligence, Opus Research
View Presentation
If you would like to have access to the recording and highlights from this session, click here

2:45 PM  –  3:15 PM
Case Study: MyPetDoc
MyPetDoc for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant is the voice of animal health. This voice app uses conversational marketing, built on extensive pet health interactions, to create credible expertise that allows pet brands to seamlessly target product messaging exactly to their customers needs.
Speaker:
Cal Lai, Chairman & CEO, Vet24seven
View Presentation
If you would like to have access to the recording and highlights from this session, click here

3:30 PM  –  4:00 PM
Panel: Achieving The Right Balance in Conversational AI
The challenges to successful Conversational Commerce strategies are often not technical in nature. They are, at base, human. Employees in some cases are called upon to train their automated replacements. Chatbots can accelerate customers to their shopping carts without detecting emotional stress or other tells. Meanwhile, debates rage about the changing nature of work in the age of IA and self-service. What human elements must a planner be mindful while defining how NLP, machine learning and chatbots can step in as the primary contact with customers and employees alike?
Speakers:
Dr. Lisa Michaud, Director, NLP, Aspect Software
Dr. Leslie Carr, Professional , Psychologist
Michael Haisten, Senior Solutions Consulting, Jacada
Mike Murphy, Managing Director, USA, Creative Virtual
Derek Top, Director of Research, Opus Research
If you would like to have access to the recording and highlights from this session, click here

4:00 PM  –  4:30 PM
Executive View: Timetable for Fostering Conversational AI
An interactive discussion, welcoming all opinions — what are the enablers for driving innovation in Conversational Commerce? What does it take to provide truly secure, personalized services in customer communications — and is it worth it?
Speakers:
Kate O’Keefe, Founder, Cisco HyperInnovation Living Labs (CHILL)
Brian Bilodeau, GM, AI Customer Success, Microsoft
Yu-Sung Chang, SVP, AI Research, SK Telecom
Dan Miller, Lead Analyst & Founder, Opus Research
If you would like to have access to the recording and highlights from this session, click here

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