Tag Archive for: IAC London 2016

IAC London 2016 Day 2 – Innovation and Inspiration in the Intelligent Assistants Field

By Rob Foster, Junior Knowledgebase Engineer & Andre Matthews, Knowledgebase Engineer

Day 2 of the Intelligent Assistants Conference burned just as brightly as the first. If you haven’t yet read our colleague’s blog on the first day of the event, you can find it here.

Darrius Jones, AVP of Enterprise Innovation at USAA, started proceedings by giving us some insight into upcoming virtual solutions in the mobile banking sector. In his keynote presentation “This is Our Moonshot”, he assured us that virtual assistants (VAs) have come a long way from the chatbot toys of yesteryear, and people are trusting VAs more and more with handling information about their lives. In fact, when looking for advice about sensitive topics like financial difficulty, often users will feel more comfortable asking a machine for help than a person. Having the right tools in place to handle customers’ needs is essential to ensuring that customers leave pleased with the service they receive. In addition, Darrius discussed how face and voice recognition is being integrated into virtual assistant platforms, cutting out the tedium of the online banking authentication process and helping to combat identity fraud.

IAC 2016 LondonAfter lunch, it was all eyes on Creative Virtual CTO, Peter Behrend as the panel discussed “Striking the ‘People Versus Machine’ Balance”. Peter highlighted the importance of Creative Virtual’s capability to allow the user to seamlessly transfer between the virtual assistant and live chat. The best customer experience is achieved when humans and machines work together, each doing what they do best. He explains that in a single session, the VA is able to offer instant, accurate responses to a wide range of questions, while a live agent can provide personal and empathetic insights if a customer has a specific query. Because VAs are doing the majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to answering the most frequently asked questions, job satisfaction of call centre workers is improving. Live agents are more stimulated now that they can avoid having to answer questions they are asked several times a day. This is a huge benefit for companies that wish to reduce employee churn and save time and money on training. And as we all know, happy workers equals higher productivity and greater customer satisfaction.

Day 2 also saw Atos CTO, David Cunningham join the panel discussion titled “Achieving Digital Transformation with Intelligent Assistants” along with Lee Beardmore from Capgemini. David shared his insights and experiences working with Creative Virtual’s virtual agent technology to deliver Digital Customer Experience Transformation (DCXT). He emphasised the countless opportunities and endless benefits of using VAs on both fronts: internally to assist employees and public-facing to solve problems directly for customers. An employee equipped with the VA is able to swiftly navigate to information needed, allowing them to provide more accurate and informative responses to customer queries. Likewise, customers can quickly get the response to their questions or navigate to the information they need, even when not fully sure what they are looking for, via the features at their disposal.

All in all, it was another day of innovation and inspiration from the Creative Virtual team and other experts in the field of virtual assistance. Congratulations to the Opus Research team on hosting a successful and thought provoking conference! Check out some more photos from the event in our IAC London 2016 album.

IAC London 2016 Day 1 – Pioneering the 4th Industrial Revolution

By Gianandrea Gaetani, Junior Knowledgebase Engineer

With all the talk revolving around the convergence of Artificial Intelligence, the present and future implementations of Intelligent Agents, Robotics, identity and biometrics, quantum, nano bio tech, and 3d printing, the Intelligent Assistants Conference held in London on the 26th and 27th of April left participants debating where we all stand in tech matters. Is it too soon to talk about the 4th Industrial Revolution just yet?

Whether we want to believe it or not, businesses today are left to navigate the chasm in an ever changing digital world. Digital and biological worlds tend to get closer with every passing year and static businesses and websites seem to be coming alive through the implementation of Intelligent Assistance.

As the Channel Owner of Swedbank, Martin Kedback, stated, in our present day, people are engaging with companies like never before. Users seem to now be logging into banking services through mobile devices 21.4 times per month on average. This data calls for a re-design of the way businesses interact with their customers. There is a strong demand for new channels of interaction that has not yet been fully addressed effectively. There is a need to hyper personalize customer experience and deliver it to the users in a quick, trustworthy and efficient way. We live in a world where the very use of our technology will be moulded by a level of hyper personalisation that can only be achieved through Intelligent Assistance.

We now live in a place where the instant access and sharing of information can determine the success or failure of an enterprise. Virtual Assistants will be playing a key role in this personal information economy. These implementations will not only have to be proficient at managing knowledge, but will also have to guarantee an increasing degree of trust, security, and satisfaction.

As silos of information everywhere are opening up to create a wider and faster world, there is a need to establish ways to effectively respond to the task at hand. The new “quick and cheap” chatbot trend seems to be providing a solution that does not guarantee any sort of satisfaction and security in the long run. These unstable solutions and a sharp 57% increase in the number of IA companies trying to enter the market today seem to be calling for the establishment of “best practice” in terms of virtual assistance. The need to respect norms of human behaviour such as permission, respect, mutual value, and trust, must be met with efficiency and security by virtual agents.

Intelligent Assistants ConferenceDuring the first day of IAC London 2016, the team members attending from Creative Virtual really felt the need to address two questions: Where do we stand, and where are we going as a global company? As our Founder and CEO, Chris Ezekiel stated, our expertise in knowledge management, agility, compatibility, technology, and the wealth of having an experienced team with an open mind, will push Creative Virtual to stay at the very top of this evolutionary wave. With regards to the future, during the Executive Summit panel, Chris pushed forth the idea that “we see the personal and commercial assistants converging in the future”. It is this mentality that makes Creative Virtual a leader in the field of Virtual Assistance.

Be sure to follow Creative Virtual on Twitter for more from Day 2 of IAC London 2016. Not able to attend the event but want to know more about our innovative virtual agent technology? Contact us to learn more!

IAC London 2016: Helping humans harness the power of intelligent assistants

By Mandy Reed, Marketing Manager (Global)

For the first time Opus Research is bringing their Intelligent Assistants Conference to Europe. IAC London 2016 is being held 26-27 April at Grosvenor House in London and will be co-located with Intelligent Authentication Conference 2016. The Opus Research team has put together an impressive agenda of expert panel discussions and keynote addresses focused on the conference theme of ‘helping humans harness the power of intelligent assistants’.

Creative Virtual is proud to be an event sponsor of IAC London 2016 and to have both our CTO, Peter Behrend, and our Founder & CEO, Chris Ezekiel, speaking as industry experts. Chris will join the ‘Executive Summit – Focus on the Enterprise’ panel discussion at 4:15 pm on Day 1, and Peter will be a panellist in the Day 2 session ‘Striking the “People Versus Machines” Balance’ scheduled to begin at 2:00 pm. Both bring years of experience within the intelligent virtual assistant and self-service space to their panels.

David Cunningham, CTO Solutions at Atos UK and Ireland, will also be speaking at the conference about Atos’ experience in building Digital Customer Experience Transformation (DCXT). Atos has partnered with Creative Virtual and two other industry leaders to deliver DCXT, a dynamic tool for personal finance management which utilises our intelligent virtual assistant technology. This enables customers to interact with the solution in natural language to pose questions and ask for in-context information based on their current financial position and what they are trying to achieve.

As an event sponsor, Creative Virtual will have a stand in the vendor exhibition area. Liam Ryan, Head of Sales, will be available at the stand to provide live demos of our innovative virtual assistant solutions for conference attendees. Be sure to stop by to say hello, see a demo and pick up some additional information.

More conference details and a full agenda can be found on the IAC London 2016 website. If you aren’t able to attend the event but would like to learn more about how your organisation can harness the power of intelligent virtual assistant technology, please contact us.