InterviewCX Intelligence10 Mar 2023 · 11 min read

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms 2023

Gartner has unveiled its much-anticipated 2023 Magic Quadrant report for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms. The release comes amid surging interest in t...

Charlie Mitchell

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms 2023

Gartner has unveiled its much-anticipated 2023 Magic Quadrant report for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms.

The release comes amid surging interest in the market. Much of this stems from the rise in ChatGPT and intrigue into how large language models may transcend the space.

Yet, it is also the continuation of an ongoing trend. In August last year, Gartner predicted that conversational AI will automate six times more agent interactions by 2026 than it did then.

As such, conversational AI vendors are licking their lips, excited by massive growth prospects in customer service and the broader enterprise.

The trouble is, they’ve got rivals - and lots of them.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant aims to break down this competitive landscape, assessing the offerings of 19 prominent global vendors and pinpointing eight market leaders.

The Definition of an Enterprise Conversational AI Platform

An Enterprise Conversational AI Platform allows users to design, orchestrate, and optimize the development of numerous enterprise bot use cases across voice and digital channels.

These use cases typically split into three groups: customer care, employee support, and enterprise NLP resources. The latter involves repurposing the NLP within bots for conversational analytics, document processing, real-time transcription, and more.

According to Gartner, a conversational AI platform supports these applications with both a capability and a tooling layer.

The capability layer includes NLU, dialogue management, channel and back-end integration, access control, and lifecycle management.

Meanwhile, the tooling layer encompasses a no-code environment for designing applications, analytics for understanding dialogue flows, NLU intent tuning, and A/B flow testing.

The sophistication of each element differs significantly from one vendor to another – as do the services they provide across various geographies.

Thankfully, the analysts at Gartner have delved deep into the offerings of many conversational AI providers, dividing them into one of four segments: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and Niche Players. Here, we review them all.

[caption id="attachment_47522" align="alignnone" width="560"] Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms 2023[/caption]

Gartner Magic Quadrant Leaders

Leaders in the Magic Quadrant guide innovation within the conversational AI space, showcasing a sharp vision and proven ability to execute. In doing so, these vendors lead the market in their creativity, platform features, and market understanding. This year’s leaders are:

Kore.ai
IBM
Amelia
Cognigy
Avaamo
OneReach.ai
Google
Omilia

Kore.ai

Kore.ai leads the market in its ability to execute while falling just shy of Avaamo and IBM in its vision. In achieving these results, Gartner notes that the vendor excels in its market understanding of conversational AI applications that supplement both the customer and employee experience. The market analyst also gives great acclaim to Kore.ai’s extending set of enterprise-ready prebuilt solutions, overall product capabilities, and skilled R&D team.

IBM

IBM Research added 400 speech, NLP, and conversational AI patents to its roster in 2022, taking its total up to 2,700. This exemplifies its thirst for innovation, which Gartner gives the vendor significant credit for. Other notable strengths include IBM's impressive range of external researchers and partners (including MIT), far-reaching global strategy, and the capabilities of the Watson Assistant. These include advanced agent escalation, conversational analytics, and prebuilt flows.

Amelia

NLU is a significant differentiator for Amelia, with its "distinctive multithreaded approach" to AI. This combines deep neural networks with semantic understanding and domain ontologies to enable sophisticated reporting capabilities and next-level bot optimization. While underlining this as Amelia's forte, Gartner applauds the company's product strategy and marketing execution as an excellent growth lever. So too, is its close partnership with CCaaS market leader NICE.

Cognigy

Perhaps most impressive of all the strengths Gartner notes is Cognigy’s continuously impressive customer feedback. The market analyst notes that clients often shine a particularly positive light on its platform’s usability, deployment options, and documentation – alongside the accompanying support services and training. Other plus points from the report include its clear product architecture, industry-specific innovation, and sustainable business model.

Avaamo

Shooting across the Magic Quadrant this year, Avaamo now appears to lead the conversational industry in the completeness of its vision. Such a vision has helped the vendor – considered a niche player in 2022 – innovate and differentiate, with Gartner tipping its cap to Avaamo’s understanding of how to best blend NLP and adjacent technologies. The market analyst also notes the vendor’s voice capabilities and industry-specific strategies – particularly in healthcare – as notable strengths.

OneReach.ai

OneReach.ai develops conversational AI applications that support the holistic "intelligent digital worker", rather than focusing wholeheartedly on contact center automation. It has enjoyed success with such a strategy, and Gartner believes this reflects its exceptional market understanding. The market analyst also pinpoints OneReach.ai's prebuilt connectors to different channels – enabling multimodal virtual assistants – their usability, and customer support as further differentiators.

Google

Google brings together a highly scalable global cloud architecture with some of the strongest AI research facilities in the world. Much of this R&D funnels cutting-edge AI capabilities into its new Contact Center AI (CCAI) Platform – increasing the scope of its conversational AI innovation. As such, it may offer "technology-leading features" for the contact center – according to Gartner. These include agent-assist, post-call summarization, and speech-to-text innovations.

Omilia

Omilia’s most defining strength is likely in its voice capabilities, with significant expertise in building telephony integrations, passive voice biometrics, and out-of-the-box, prebuilt bots. Yet, its architecture – which consists of Omilia Cloud Platform (OCP) miniApps – also garners praise from Gartner. These make it possible to turn tasks and skills into modules that designers can reuse across their other bot-based projects for no additional cost.

Gartner Magic Quadrant Challengers

Challengers in the Magic Quadrant exhibit a track for delivering upon client expectations. With this, they have gained a considerable market presence. However, they often lack the vision to rip up the script and create nuanced uses of conversational AI. This year’s challengers are:

Yellow.ai
Sprinklr
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
boost.ai

Yellow.ai

Jumping up the Magic Quadrant in 2023, Yellow.ai has seemingly gone to great lengths to prove its ability to execute. Much of this fixates on buyer personas and customer needs. Yet, Yellow.ai's explosive employee growth - doubling the size of its staff last year – has likely lifted its reputation for delivering customer outcomes. With that said, it still lags behind the leaders in the number of patents it holds, which may stifle its future innovation ambitions, according to Gartner.

Sprinklr

Featured for the first time, Sprinklr springs into the challenger segment thanks largely to its contact center expertise. Indeed, Gartner shines a positive light on its outbound communication automation, agent-assist, and agent-augmentation features – each accompanied by "solid" R&D efforts. The analyst suggests these are strong enough for Sprinklr to sustain its innovation objectives. However, most consider Sprinklr a marketing tool, with conversation AI lacking visibility within its portfolio.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS has risen up the conversation AI ranks, tying its Lex solution together with its Amazon Connect CCaaS platform. As such, users can funnel customer conversations into an automated chatbot designer, simplifying the bot-building process. As Connect leads its space in customer acquisition – according to a 2022 Metrigy study – this supplements its global sales and marketing strategy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always integrate quite so neatly with third-party systems, as per Gartner.

boost.ai

boost.ai excels in its implementation scalability, supporting rapid deployments of a significant size – often encompassing thousands of intents – and their continuous optimization. Gartner also notes its agent-assist tooling as a strength, integrating with contact center and CRM platforms to surface conversational data for service reps. Unfortunately, boost.ai does not provide native speech-to-text or text-to-speech capabilities, so customers may also have to lean on third-party providers.

Gartner Magic Quadrant Visionaries

Visionaries have spotted opportunities within the market to provide innovation. Often rolled up by more prominent players, these vendors push the boundaries with a forward-thinking vision that excites clients. Nevertheless, their ability to execute typically lags those that make it to the top-right quadrant. This year's sole visionary is:

Openstream.ai

Openstream.ai

Openstream.ai’s dialogue management capabilities set it apart from rival providers. These dynamically infer the user’s goals midway through an interaction, adapting responses beyond the basic identification of customer intent. Such features extend across channels and combine with a vision to bring new technologies into its innovation, including image recognition and integrated data processing tools. Nevertheless, Gartner pinpoints its interface usability and consistency as a caution.

Gartner Magic Quadrant Niche Players

Businesses with a clear-cut conversational AI use case can often find success in working with a niche player and recoup a worthwhile ROI. However, these vendors sometimes lack the cross-industry adoption, flexibility, and functional components to compete at the top end of the market. This year's niche players are:

Laiye
Aisera
[24]7.ai
Inbenta
Sinch
eGain

Laiye

Gartner highlights the analytics and optimization of Laiye's platform as a particular strength. Meanwhile, it is growing its market presence following its acquisition of fellow conversational AI specialist Mindsay in 2022. Its $160 million Series C funding round in April last year may also further this growth beyond its headquarters in China. Nonetheless, Gartner suggests that Laiye must create more pre-built industry-specific components and expand its employee-focused use cases.

Aisera

Aisera combines its conversational AI with many mainstream helpdesk solutions to focus significantly on customer service use cases. These expand across industries, with Gartner noting this strategy as a considerable strength alongside its global presence. Its no-code environment does, however, seem to let the vendor down. According to Gartner, it seems less intuitive than rival offerings – particularly in regard to its development, maintenance, and human-in-the-loop solutions.

[24]7.ai

247.ai has worked in many large service operations, delivering conversational self-service deployments in often complex environments – such as large BPOs. Gartner considers this experience a significant strength, alongside its agent escalation function that carries over critical context from virtual to live agents. Yet, beyond the contact center, its applications are more limited than its competitors. Moreover, [24]7.ai ran into bad press last year over its treatment of employees.

Inbenta

Inbenta leverages an NLP engine and a large lexicon that it has continuously developed since 2008. During this time, its solution has become excellent at uncovering various ways of stating intents and picking up on contextual clues for intent recognition. However, its implementations are primarily text-based, and Gartner recommends that customers working with Inbenta to build voicebots should ensure experienced integrators are available.

Sinch

Sinch is best known for CPaaS. Using this to enable real-time communication across many channels has opened up significant scope for automation, which it seizes through conversation AI. As such, its customers may work with fewer vendors. Gartner underlines such viability and market execution as a differentiator. However, its overall product capabilities trail others within the report, while the market analyst pinpoints its mixed market focus as an ongoing concern.

eGain

Most CX professionals consider eGain a knowledge base provider, and the close connection between this technology and its conversational AI allows for an often efficient Q&A functionality. Such a product architecture combined with its clear marketing message and contact center experience are plus points for eGain. Unfortunately, it trails other vendors in the quadrant in the sophistication of its offering beyond customer service, tools for technical users, and application development.

What Has Changed Since 2022?

Here is a side-by-side view of the 2022 and 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms.

Comparing these, it seems that Avaamo has taken the crown for the most improved conversational AI vendor in 2022, moving from a niche player to a market leader. Moreover, the vendor now leads the pack in its completeness of vision – as per the report.

Google also joined the market leaders quadrant after launching a CCaaS platform last year and tightly tying its conversational AI solutions to it, enabling greater accessibility.

Meanwhile, IBM, Cognigy, and OneReach.ai have cemented their positions as market leaders, pushing much closer to the top-right of the charge.

There are also new challengers, with Yellow.ai, AWS, and boost.ai jumping from their niche player status earned back in 2022. New entrant Spinklr joins them there.

All the other newbies filter into the niche player segment. These are: Laiye, Inbenta, and eGain.

Unfortunately, five vendors dropped off this year, reducing the total number of entrants from 21 to 19. These included: Oracle, Verint, Senseforth, Rasa, SmarTek21, and Aivo.

It is perhaps a surprise to see Oracle and Verint drop off. Indeed, last year Gartner declared Oracle a challenger. Meanwhile, Verint recently acquired Speakeasy.ai, a fellow conversational AI player.

However, hopefully, they will make a welcome return in 2024 as the race to fill the growing demand for conversational AI solutions heats up.

Want to delve deeper into the Gartner Magic Quadrant archive? If so, check out the following 2022 editions covering other enterprise technologies:

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