Download a copy of Forrester's "The Top Emerging Technologies In Artificial Intelligence" here.
The Top Emerging AI Technologies
Even though AI is poised to “completely reframe how businesses operate and consumers interact” many firms are not ready to invest. The two top reasons for the standstill are:
- We are unclear what AI can be used for in our business
- There is no defined business case for AI investment
One reason behind the standstill is the AI landscape is complex. Navigating the AI ecosystem and prioritizing investment is becoming increasingly difficult.
15 Top Emerging Technologies
Forrester says, “AI technologies can help customer insights (CI) pros better understand and interact with customers by mimicking human cognitive functions to sense, think, and act. Forrester has identified AI as one of the top 15 emerging technologies that has the potential to change the world in the next five years.” Here's a list:
Forrester's 15 technologies for the next 5 years:
Using AI for customer insights and customer engagement optimization is especially important to us because it helps us answer three key questions:
- How do we orchestrate the complex customer journey?
- How can we surface insights about customers and operations automatically?
- How can we unpack unstructured data for analysis?
12 AI Technologies
To help us answer these questions and navigate AI, Forrester recently analyzed the 12 most important AI categories for customer insights. The 12 AI technologies Forrester evaluated are:
- AI-enhanced analytics solutions
- Conversational service solutions
- Deep learning platforms
- Facial recognition
- Image and video analysis
- Intelligent recommendation solutions
- Intelligent research solutions
- Machine learning platforms
- Natural language generation
- Pre-trained vertical solutions
- Speech analytics
- Text analytics
Note: Contact Solutions and Verint (our parent company) are active and/or have offerings in most of these categories.
Forrester did a deep dive into these 12 technologies to evaluate which should be on their short list. They found only four (just 30%) of those technologies are mature enough to deliver business value and impact on customer insight.
In a new report, The Top Emerging Technologies In Artificial Intelligence, Forrester digs into the four AI categories and assess each one. (You can, for limited time, download here)
The Top 4 AI Technologies
The four AI technologies on Forrester's short list are:
- AI-enhanced analytics solutions
- Deep learning (DL)
- Natural language generation (NLG)
- Speech analytics
The report goes through each technology in detail providing you with pros and cons and recommendations. (Interesting that these four track pretty close to MIT’s 5 Big Predictions for Artificial Intelligence in 2017.)
You might be surprised to find you are already using these technologies in the contact center. Let’s take a closer look:
AI-enhanced Analytics Solutions: Forrester defines this category as one that helps orchestrate the customer journey and experience. These systems can understand the customer, learn preferences, predict next best action/solution, and surface insights. We believe this is a top priority area for the contact center as AI-enhanced analytics solutions can deliver new and stronger business benefit. Fraud detection is just one example.
Deep Learning (DL): DL is a type of machine learning algorithm that is a game changer in its ability to generate better predictions/insights, scale up with large data sets, and reduce the effort to build the model. In the contact center, DL is used in conversational systems (speech rec, NLG, NLU, etc), Speech Analytics, and other areas. Contact Solutions and Verint use DL in their products today and believe this will be one of the primary drivers of future innovation.
Natural Language Generation (NLG): NLG is a part of the tech stack in conversational systems. NLG uses advanced AI algorithms to generate speech from text. NLG is used to generate speech in Alexa, in Virtual Assistants and in a Natural Language IVR. We use NLG as part of our SmartCare conversational platform that powers IVR and Chatbot channels.
Speech Analytics: Speech analytics uses AI technology to recognize speech, convert speech into text, and perform analytics on the text data set. This technology is used today in many contact centers to improve customer interactions, CX and agent performance. See, Verint’s speech analytics product as an example.
Get The Report
Read The Top Emerging Technologies In Artificial Intelligence to understand the technologies’ current benefits and shortcomings and to focus your resources accordingly.
Then take a look at your contact center. You might have some of these technologies deployed. You might even be able to tell your friends, ' Yep, we've been using AI for years.' Good job contact center.
We are offering the report as a free download for a limited time. Get your copy here.
