While the race to embed AI functionality in communications platforms continues to gather pace, acquihires are becoming increasingly more common - as sought-after expertise combined with already viable products make for an attractive investment, enabling communications providers to get to market fast with enhancements their customers need.
As Omar Javaid, President of Vonage’s API Platform, explained about their recent acquihire of Over.ai’s voice and conversational AI technology platform, it was a natural progression of their collaboration in any case:
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Omar Javaid[/caption]
“We've been working with the team for over a year. So they had a chance to work with us, we had a chance to work with them. There's always a cultural element, which makes or breaks these things.” This facilitated smooth integration of the Over.ai technical team with the Vonage Tel Aviv based R+D team, so they could rapidly “mesh together and do amazing work”.
We spoke to Javaid to explore this amazingness from the client perspective, and he elaborated that the impact of AI layer would first be significant in their Vonage Business Cloud (VBC) unified communications solution and the NewVoiceMedia contact centre solutions, offering two immediate benefits there.
Process automation by AI
The first is automatic processing of routine enquiries. “We analysed the data, and about 80% of the calls that come in, they’re looking for the same kind of information - what are your operating hours, etc”. Many of these enquiries can be identified through processing with Over.ai’s Natural Language Understanding (NLU) algorithms, and addressed by the AI directly - resolving the customer’s issue fast, and reducing wait times to zero.
Javaid was keen to stress that it’s not about removing jobs from human operators, but removing the drudgery of responding to ‘frequently asked questions’, and ensuring that the enquiries which demand it are escalated promptly to humans who can address them.