AI Breakthroughs: Salesforce, Accenture, GoTo, Zoom, More

Accenture announced a $3 billion investment over three years in its Data & AI practice. The goal is to help clients across all industries rapidly and responsibly advance and use AI to achieve greater growth, efficiency and resilience, the company said.

Julie Sweet, chair and CEO, at Accenture said that there is unprecedented interest in all areas of AI. Additionally, the substantial investment the firm is making in its Data & AI practice will help clients move from interest to action to value, and in a responsible way with clear business cases.

“Companies that build a strong foundation of AI by adopting and scaling it now, where the technology is mature and delivers clear value, will be better positioned to reinvent, compete and achieve new levels of performance,” Sweet said. “Our clients have complex environments, and at a time when the technology is changing rapidly, our deep understanding of ecosystem solutions allows us to help them navigate quickly and cost effectively to make smart decisions.”

The company’s AI expertise spans more than 1,450 patents and pending patent applications worldwide and hundreds of client solutions at scale, ranging from marketing to retail and security to manufacturing. Accenture has embedded AI across its service delivery approach, driving efficiency, insights, and accelerating value for thousands of clients through its market leading platforms such as myWizard, SynOps, and MyNav, it said.

Paul Daugherty is group chief executive at Accenture Technology.

“Over the next decade, AI will be a mega-trend, transforming industries, companies, and the way we live and work, as generative AI transforms 40% of all working hours,” Daugherty said. “Our expanded Data & AI practice brings together the full power and breadth of Accenture in creating industry-specific solutions that will help our clients harness AI’s full potential to reshape their strategy, technology, and ways of working, driving innovation and value responsibly and faster than ever before.”

Vectara, the generative AI conversational search platform, has named seasoned industry leaders to build and drive the sales, marketing, developer and partner ecosystem charters, the company said. The strategy is reinforced by Vectara’s aim to be a developer-first API platform, allowing co-innovation and value creation for Vectara customers and partners, the company said.

Vectara’s new GTM leadership team consists of:

“We’re at the cusp of an industry-defining moment to shape ecosystem values and ‘humanize partnerships’ in the age fueled by the tremendous AI opportunity,” Hamdan said. “There is no better time than now to imagine and build ‘the art of possible’ of Vectara’s partner ecosystem future. I’m thrilled to embark on Vectara’s journey with a team of successful entrepreneur founders, GTM leaders, and AI technologists. We’re well poised to enable delightful customer and partner experiences.”

Twilio and Google Cloud announced an expansion of their longstanding partnership to bring Google Cloud generative artificial intelligence (AI) to Twilio’s customer engagement products to improve experiences for millions of end users.

For more than 10 years, Google Cloud and Twilio have been working together to innovate in the customer engagement space. Now, the companies are exploring new ways to infuse generative AI into Twilio Flex (the cloud-based digital engagement solution for personalized interactions across contact centers, sales and in-app concierge) and across the Twilio Customer Engagement Platform, with the shared goal of transforming how brands personalize their customer interactions.

Meir Amiel, SVP of product and engineering for data and applications at Twilio, said companies have only scratched the surface of seeing how generative AI can reshape customer experiences across the board.

“With Google on board as a trusted partner, the confluence of Twilio’s customer engagement platform data and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI models aims to put generative AI capabilities in the hands of hundreds of thousands of businesses, enhancing contact center experiences, marketing automation, and more,” Amiel said. “We look forward to forging ahead with further innovation in the years to come.”

As part of the expanded partnership, Google Cloud and Twilio are announcing a new native integration between Google Cloud Contact Center AI and Twilio Flex. The integration makes it easy to deploy sophisticated AI-powered virtual agents that can offer conversational self-service interactions, which can be deployed in a single click. Utilizing conversational AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to act as the first line of customer support, these virtual agents can be configured to positively handle support requests with little to no human agent intervention. This means that customers can receive 24/7 assistance and have their needs addressed quickly, with more than 30 languages and variants supported. It also enables contact center representatives to spend their time efficiently, by having the virtual agents accurately route priority callers with more complex service needs to the proper agent while providing context from the initial interaction.

Next, Google Cloud and Twilio are exploring the powerful potential of bringing generative AI into Flex to transform customer experience for everyday users to enable: personalized service, efficiency and analysis, and deeper understanding.  

66degrees, a Google Cloud premier partner, has engaged with the cloud giant to develop new generative AI solutions. The partnership is a continuation of the work 66degrees has done with Google Cloud, including the development of best practices for building more traditional AI/ML solutions.

Matt Kestian, CEO of 66degrees, said the company has witnessed firsthand the profound impact of generative AI.

“It has unveiled a new era of creativity and innovation, empowering businesses to reimagine what’s possible,” Kestian said. “From generating code, content or hyper-realistic images to crafting personalized customer experiences, generative AI is revolutionizing industries and unlocking untapped potential. Embracing this transformative technology is not just an option; it’s a strategic imperative for organizations seeking to lead and thrive in the digital age.”

Recently, 66degrees began incorporating generative AI into its AI/ML projects. Already, the Data Science team is building solutions for education, customer experience and customer support using Google Cloud’s foundation models and generative AI capabilities in Vertex AI.

Vertex AI provides purpose-built tools for data scientists and ML engineers to efficiently and responsibly automate, standardize and manage ML projects throughout the entire development life cycle. Using Vertex AI, data scientists and ML engineers can easily train, test, monitor, deploy and govern ML models at scale, reducing the work needed to maintain model performance in production and enabling scientists and engineers to focus on innovation code.

Jeremy Rafuse, VP and head of digital workplace at GoTo, delivered recent commentary on the impacts of AI in the IT ecosystem.

He writes:

“The topic of AI is dominating the news agenda. With the exponential rise of AI engines, public figures are calling for officials to ‘regulate before it’s too late’ over growing AI anxiety – will I be replaced by a robot? But we’re missing something here when questioning AI: the human touch.

“Humans have the innate ability to question when things aren’t quite right, taking active leadership in the way that their systems operate. Human support can offer empathy and emotional support to users who are frustrated, helping to build a stronger connection between users and the IT support team. It is only alongside human expertise that AI and advanced machine learning can run effectively. Human support staff can provide guidance and expertise to AI systems to help them better understand and respond to requests. By training AI systems and incorporating human feedback, AI can improve its accuracy and responsiveness over time. This will bolster business IT capacities by reducing downtime and operating more efficiently.

“As organizations move forward in 2023, it would be unwise to dismiss AI, as used correctly it will become the most valuable business tool. Organizations will continue to face mounting pressures, and IT teams specifically are expected to see increased workloads as businesses continue to digitalize. By implementing artificial intelligence into IT support, it can respond instantly to common IT support queries, freeing up human support staff to focus on more complex issues that require human expertise. Combining the strengths of AI and human support will not only increase the productivity of IT support but create a ripple effect to improve the efficiency of all organizational operations. In turn, this improves the experience for employees and customers alike, and highlights the critical role IT plays in organizations of all sizes.”

Mosaicx, a cloud-based conversational AI solution, announced the launch of the new Mosaicx Agent program. Through the program, the Mosaicx sales team will partner with agents who have identified companies struggling to understand their AI options and together present the best Mosaicx solution to fit their needs.

Businesses are embracing conversational AI to decrease operational expenses, foster brand loyalty and improve customer experiences. The Mosaicx Agent program helps these businesses navigate emerging technologies. Agents partner with Mosaicx sales team members to educate and supply decision makers with industry-specific AI solutions to manage high call volumes and staffing shortages and provide quality customer service.

“We are excited to partner with agents to help companies scale their customer experience strategies and enhance customer retention with AI,” said Rebecca Jones, general manager of Mosaicx. “Through this program, agents can generate new revenue opportunities and become valued providers of robust conversational AI functionality. This program reinforces Mosaicx’ role as a trusted advisor and our commitment to delivering exceptional customer experiences across industries.”

Dubber, the network-based conversation intelligence and capture provider, has launched “Moments,” an AI product designed to redefine what individuals and organizations expect from their communications and bring a new level of engagement between Dubbers more than 170 global service provider partners and their customers.

Moments includes a growing suite of features, powered by advanced AI and conversation intelligence that goes beyond the words and identifies the context within the voice conversation. 

A single identified “Moment” provides immediate benefit within a conversation, but when correlated across an entire organization, it creates “Insights.” Employing data visualization, Insights provides an intuitive snapshot of communication patterns and trends, transforming complex data into understandable intelligence for individuals and all sizes of business.

Future product roadmap releases will include a range of new “Moments” that will help organizations to improve customer experience, enhance the performance of individuals, teams and improve employee engagement. 

Zoom has launched key features of Zoom IQ, a smart companion that empowers collaboration and unlocks people’s potential through generative AI. Now available through free trials for customers in select plans, the Zoom Meeting summary and Zoom Team Chat compose features that will help teams improve productivity, balance workday priorities and collaborate more effectively.

Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom, said the introduction of these capabilities in Zoom IQ frees up more time for creative work and expanding collaboration.

“There is no one-size-fits-all approach to large language models, and with Zoom’s federated approach to AI, we are able to bring powerful capabilities to our customers and users through Zoom’s own models as well as our partners’ models,” Hashim said.   

Zoom’s federated approach to AI leverages its own proprietary large language AI models, those from leading AI companies — such as OpenAI and Anthropic — and select customers’ own models. With this flexibility to incorporate multiple types of models, Zoom’s goal is to provide the most value for its customers’ diverse needs. 

The first set of Zoom IQ capabilities is now generally available to Zoom customers in select plans as free trials. These include meeting summary and chat compose.

The next set of generative AI-powered features, coming soon, will allow users to draft email content, summarize Team Chat threads, organize ideas and draft whiteboard content. These include email composition, Zoom Team Chat threat summaries, meeting queries, whiteboard draft and whiteboard synthesize.

Automation Anywhere, the provider of cloud-native intelligent automation, is working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring intelligent automation and generative AI innovations to market. Leveraging Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, a service that delivers open-source, pre-trained models and Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service from AWS that makes pre-trained Foundation Models (FMs) accessible via an API, Automation Anywhere will offer customers with greater choice, flexibility and reliability for their generative AI deployments, the company said.

Mihir Shukla, CEO and co-Founder at Automation Anywhere, said the organization’s vision has always been to make automation accessible to everyone, anywhere.

“Putting our cloud-native Automation Success Platform on AWS was the first step, and now through intelligent automation fused with generative AI on AWS, we enable every employee in every company with the potential to transform business and reshape the way we live and work.”

Working together since 2017, Automation Anywhere previously launched its cloud-native RPA solution on AWS. The years-long relationship between Automation Anywhere and AWS has evolved from core infrastructure to the application layer with AI. Automation Anywhere will now develop generative AI powered solutions in customer experience, document processing and contact center intelligence using Amazon SageMaker Jumpstart, Amazon Bedrock, and other AWS AI and ML services, further strengthening the go-to-market relationship, officials said.

Automation Anywhere has also joined the AWS Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Accelerate Program, a co-sell program for AWS Partners that provides software solutions that run on or integrate with AWS.

Genesys has expanded generative AI capabilities for experience orchestration, helping organizations unlock deeper customer and operational insights using the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) as a force multiplier for employees. Now with auto-summarization for Agent Assist, the Genesys Cloud CX platform helps organizations drive increased quality, speed and accuracy by enabling employees to efficiently capture conversational intelligence from digital and voice interactions.  

The latest generative AI addition to the platform deepens Genesys AI’s predictive, conversational language processing and analytics capabilities. This provides a powerful foundation for organizations to continuously improve customer and employee experiences through smarter automation, personalization and optimization. 

Olivier Jouve, chief product officer at Genesys, said the company long used large language models within Genesys AI to help organizations proactively orchestrate experiences that lead to stronger customer and employee outcomes.

“Through responsible development that responds to our customers’ needs, we’re accelerating our pace of innovation with the latest generations of generative AI to help organizations gain greater value from their data, rapidly create new content and break language barriers,” Jouve said. “We’re also considering the roles and expertise we may need to fuel our R&D strategy for the future, like prompt engineering and curation.”

The Genesys AI platform for customer and employee experience gives organizations a reliable foundation for innovation to apply capabilities such as natural language processing (NLP) to understand sentiment, intent, empathy and effort across any interactions. Genesys trains its embedded models with curated, trusted data across multiple industries, languages, use cases, dimensions and more. The company has adopted stringent AI ethics guidelines and is committed to creating customer value through the best technology.  

Auto-summarization for Agent Assist is the latest of several new generative AI-based offerings expected for Genesys Cloud CX. In addition, the open APIs of the Genesys Cloud CX platform allow organizations to innovate using other generative AI solutions available on the market to support their businesses’ unique needs. Genesys also leverages generative AI within Exceed.ai, which gives sales teams a tool to auto-generate email content for lead development, pipeline nurture and more.

Genesys has expanded generative AI capabilities for experience orchestration, helping organizations unlock deeper customer and operational insights using the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) as a force multiplier for employees. Now with auto-summarization for Agent Assist, the Genesys Cloud CX platform helps organizations drive increased quality, speed and accuracy by enabling employees to efficiently capture conversational intelligence from digital and voice interactions.  

The latest generative AI addition to the platform deepens Genesys AI’s predictive, conversational language processing and analytics capabilities. This provides a powerful foundation for organizations to continuously improve customer and employee experiences through smarter automation, personalization and optimization. 

Olivier Jouve, chief product officer at Genesys, said the company long used large language models within Genesys AI to help organizations proactively orchestrate experiences that lead to stronger customer and employee outcomes.

“Through responsible development that responds to our customers’ needs, we’re accelerating our pace of innovation with the latest generations of generative AI to help organizations gain greater value from their data, rapidly create new content and break language barriers,” Jouve said. “We’re also considering the roles and expertise we may need to fuel our R&D strategy for the future, like prompt engineering and curation.”

The Genesys AI platform for customer and employee experience gives organizations a reliable foundation for innovation to apply capabilities such as natural language processing (NLP) to understand sentiment, intent, empathy and effort across any interactions. Genesys trains its embedded models with curated, trusted data across multiple industries, languages, use cases, dimensions and more. The company has adopted stringent AI ethics guidelines and is committed to creating customer value through the best technology.  

Auto-summarization for Agent Assist is the latest of several new generative AI-based offerings expected for Genesys Cloud CX. In addition, the open APIs of the Genesys Cloud CX platform allow organizations to innovate using other generative AI solutions available on the market to support their businesses’ unique needs. Genesys also leverages generative AI within Exceed.ai, which gives sales teams a tool to auto-generate email content for lead development, pipeline nurture and more.