Opus Research has tracked exponential growth in the number of Intelligent Assistants in service in the form of chatbots, message bots and automated virtual agents. On our web site and in dozens of reports and webcasts we chronicled thousands success stories at banks, airlines, phone companies, cosmetics purveyors and online merchants.

But what about the executives at companies, the majority of implementers, whose experience has been different. They are neither successes or failures; just older, wiser and more experienced with solution providers who offer to solve their problems with Deep Neural Networks, Conversational AI and chatbots. Three years into a revolution in Conversational Commerce, with tens of thousands of “Proof of Concepts” and a myriad of marketplaces for microservices and APIs, there’s good cause for decision makers to press the “Pause” button.

Enter Opus Research and the Conversational Commerce Conference (#C32019).

We’ve designed a one- day event following a single guiding principle:

“Conversations are the optimal model for customer engagement”

Sessions and speakers are Informed by five foundational concepts:

• Conversations take place over time (asynchronously) and involve multiple turns and topics: The best customer experience is the result of better listening and analysis of input provided by people using their own words.
• In moments when an automated Intelligent Assistant is involved, it must offer correct answers or recommendations consistently and at scale: Conversational Service Automation (makes this possible)
• Answers or recommendations rely on speedy access to conversational intelligence, i.e. conversation history, documents (product manuals), data (warehouse inventory) or processes (like travel booking systems) that fulfill the customer’s request: Speakers are here to discuss how they developed their solutions to operate at enterprise scale.
• Automation augments, rather than replaces humans, making agents more productive, employees more efficient and customers more pleased: Planning and implementing a “bot strategy” must be done with existing personnel in mind.
• AI is not always the answer, meaning that companies can leverage investment already made to create directed dialogs through Interactive Voice Response, Webchat, FAQs and other rules-based systems: This applies as companies plan tactics for voice-first, mobile and messaging based Intelligent Assistance.

Implementer experience will be will represented through panel discussions, use cases and case studies by executives from Citizens Financial Group, Fannie Mae, TD Ameritrade, Simon, Campbells Soup, Discount Show Warehouse (DSW), LiveNation, and RAIN.

And the solution provider community will well represented by sponsors Uniphore, Nuance, Marchex, Inference, Concentrix, ID R&D and Invoca, as well as Google, Milestone Technologies, Interactions, LLC, Servion, SNAPS and Ring Central.

We’re also pleased to have Project Voice as a Media Sponsor.

It’s hard to predict the executives in charge of successfully implementing bots, virtual agents, intelligent assistants or Conversational AI but, if it’s you, this is the one industry gathering that will tell-it-like-it-is; balancing real-world experience with informed technology forecasting.

Please join us by registering here.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Events, Articles