AI Breakthroughs: Nextiva, NICE, UJET, Dialpad, More
Dialpad aims to unveil a litany of AI tools over the course of a year.
April 20, 2023
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Cloud communications company Nextiva has acquired Simplify360, an AI customer experience platform based in India. Simplify360 uses AI and automation to enable more than 5,000 global businesses to deliver customer support across multiple channels. This includes email, live chat, social media, online reviews and e-commerce. Nextiva isn’t saying how much it’s paying for Simplify360.
Tomas Gorny, co-founder and CEO of Nextiva, said conversations are the fuel of business growth.
“From day one, Nextiva’s vision has been to bring together all communication channels into a single stream of conversations with productivity, customer and contact management and collaboration tools. We are on a mission to put an end to unhappy customers and frustrated teams,” Gorny said. “No more time wasted toggling between multiple applications – Nextiva keeps teams productive and connected with customers, colleagues, and vendors from wherever they are in the world.”
Nextiva officials said they are leveling the playing field so businesses of all sizes can access advanced technology to compete with the largest tech companies.
The acquisition of India-based Simplify360 opens the door to the Asia-Pacific market for Nextiva as the company expands to support more businesses globally.
NICE unveiled its Enlighten Actions, an artificial intelligence-based solution that incorporates generative AI to create “smart” and “humanized” connections with customers.
Enlighten Actions brings together Enlighten, NICE’s mature and differentiated purpose-built AI for CX, and the generative models from Open AI. The innovation combines Enlighten’s specialized AI models for CX trained using billions of CX interactions with the broad, generative models used to build ChatGPT. Organizations can now build AI-powered CX processes faster and easier than before.
“Enlighten Actions is a next-generation AI innovation,” said Barry Cooper, president, CX Division, NICE. “Enlighten Actions revolutionizes how businesses use data to help drive growth. Combining Enlighten AI and generative AI, NICE has broken down the siloes to create an unparalleled knowledge base to deliver truly transformative actions for businesses.”
It’s now possible for both customers and agents to incorporate unstructured data into natural language queries and responses, officials said.
Vonage has launched the Vonage AI Acceleration Suite. It’s a portfolio of AI-capable, low-code/no-code programmable components that speed and simplify the development of applications. These applications deliver smarter solutions to drive business productivity and better experiences and engagements.
The AI Acceleration Suite (which includes AI Studio, Proactive Connect and Meetings API) integrates Vonage Communications APIs for voice, video, SMS and messaging. According to Vonage officials, this allows businesses and developers to rapidly deploy rich, omnichannel customer journeys that use the power of AI and customer data to incorporate intelligence and automation into their customer experience applications.
An overwhelming demand for developers in an increasingly competitive landscape has led to the rise of a new community of “citizen developers.” They want to create applications easily and quickly.
Windstream Enterprise has added a new CCaaS solution fueled by Talkdesk to its Contact Center Solution (CCS) portfolio.
The solution — Windstream Enterprise CCaaS powered by Talkdesk — provides enterprises with a set of intelligent, AI-powered contact center capabilities to deliver scalable and secure multichannel customer experiences. It also improves agent productivity. The next-generation CCaaS solution unites proprietary AI, natural language processing and machine learning technologies from Talkdesk with Windstream Enterprise’s managed services. Enterprises can view, analyze and manage every aspect of the customer journey from a single, user-friendly portal, Windstream officials said.
“With Windstream Enterprise CCaaS powered by Talkdesk, enterprises gain a managed CCaaS solution that turns the customer experience into a true competitive advantage, helping agents to counter the high customer abandonment rates, lost sales and customer churn that often result from a reliance on aging legacy contact center systems,” said Austin Herrington, vice president, product management, Windstream Enterprise.
IntelePeer, the communications automation platform provider, announced that SmartAgent will now leverage ChatGPT and eventually other generative AI technologies. SmartAgent is the company ’s digital solution for contact centers.
Contact centers currently struggle to keep up with high customer expectations, IntelePeer said. Long wait times, inconsistent service quality and high employee turnover rates continue to plague the industry. By integrating ChatGPT into its SmartAgent offering, IntelePeer said it can reduce the cost of labor for contact centers through hyper-automation while allowing agents to focus on higher value, revenue-generating customer care tasks.
“The infusion of ChatGPT into the contact center environment is truly a watershed moment for the industry, and we are thrilled to be at the forefront of this exciting new approach,” said Frank Fawzi, CEO of IntelePeer. “Our SmartAgent offering, with its simplified pricing and advanced feature sets, including AI, analytics and omnichannel orchestration, will become even more powerful with the addition of generative AI tools like ChatGPT. Moreover, our implementation of this technology into our customer service solutions is a critical element of IntelePeer’s larger transition to a communications automation provider.”
This week Dialpad reiterated it has the industry’s only all-in-one AI Customer Intelligence Platform – powered by a highly trained AI model that spans all modes of employee and customer communications. In the company’s next phase of development, Dialpad customers will be equipped over the next year with new generative AI-powered features. These include the ability to recap missed meetings; to analyze 100% of customer interactions; to provide a single source of all training and coaching; and to offer teal-time guidance to ensure consistent processes.
“AI harbors the potential to transform industries beyond our imagination,” stated Craig Walker, CEO and founder of Dialpad. “Its power to elevate business communication enables sales, recruiters and support agents to excel. However, merely activating AI won’t ensure success. Those with a siloed AI approach won’t maximize ROI and relying on third-party APIs limits innovation. Dialpad is the only comprehensive platform with native, proprietary AI across all channels, providing businesses worldwide with unmatched intelligence.”
In addition, Dialpad announced that it has surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Contact center platform UJET has a new partnership with Alvaria and Google Cloud. The partnership enables enterprise contact centers to integrate and leverage Alvaria’s compliant outbound and workforce engagement management (WEM) capabilities through Google Cloud Contact Center AI Platform.
Enterprises including financial services, airlines, retail, telecom and technology organizations are seeking AI-first platforms to power secure, natural customer interactions at scale, UJET said. These seamless customer experiences also require a unified, engaged workforce. Alvaria WEM solutions provide agents with flexible scheduling options, gamification, performance tracking and automated workflows. This increases agent engagement and reduces attrition.
Alvaria outbound capabilities streamline agent workflows with easy-to-use, compliant campaign management tools, the company said. Alvaria complements Google Cloud Contact Center AI platform by providing solutions that drive agent success, keep them engaged and make them feel like an extension of the brand.
Anand Janefalkar, CEO at UJET, said this partnership means the companies can meet several needs at once.
“UJET and Google Cloud have quickly become a real force in the contact center industry due to our early focus not only on AI and mobile-first CX transformation, but also security, resiliency, and scale — all fundamental requirements for the modern enterprise,” Janefalkar said. “These same enterprises also need additional advanced outreach and rich workforce engagement capabilities such as multichannel agent scheduling, tracking and adherence, and quality recording to properly coach and improve agent behavior.
Contact center platform UJET has a new partnership with Alvaria and Google Cloud. The partnership enables enterprise contact centers to integrate and leverage Alvaria’s compliant outbound and workforce engagement management (WEM) capabilities through Google Cloud Contact Center AI Platform.
Enterprises including financial services, airlines, retail, telecom and technology organizations are seeking AI-first platforms to power secure, natural customer interactions at scale, UJET said. These seamless customer experiences also require a unified, engaged workforce. Alvaria WEM solutions provide agents with flexible scheduling options, gamification, performance tracking and automated workflows. This increases agent engagement and reduces attrition.
Alvaria outbound capabilities streamline agent workflows with easy-to-use, compliant campaign management tools, the company said. Alvaria complements Google Cloud Contact Center AI platform by providing solutions that drive agent success, keep them engaged and make them feel like an extension of the brand.
Anand Janefalkar, CEO at UJET, said this partnership means the companies can meet several needs at once.
“UJET and Google Cloud have quickly become a real force in the contact center industry due to our early focus not only on AI and mobile-first CX transformation, but also security, resiliency, and scale — all fundamental requirements for the modern enterprise,” Janefalkar said. “These same enterprises also need additional advanced outreach and rich workforce engagement capabilities such as multichannel agent scheduling, tracking and adherence, and quality recording to properly coach and improve agent behavior.
Over the last few weeks, many companies operating within the channel have unveiled what we at Channel Futures call AI breakthroughs. In the slideshow above, we’ve selected seven companies that stood out for various reasons in the UCaaS and CCaaS spaces. It is officials in these industries who are working at lightning speed to keep up with the rapid onslaught of AI advances to bring a seamless technological experience to customers. For some partners, understanding the barrage of advances may seem overwhelming. We hope condensing these breakthroughs in lists like these will provide some clarity and organization.
For this one, we’ve featured Dialpad‘s aims to unveil a litany of AI tools over the course of a year. Over at UJET, the company is partnering with Alvaria and Google Cloud for workforce engagement management (WEM). Also, ChatGPT integrations are numerous. We’ve highlighted the work of two organizations, however that only represents of sliver of the firms applying Open AI’s tool. As for Vonage, it’s utilizing a portfolio of AI-capable, low-code/no-code programmable components for “citizen” developers.
That’s the quick summary. If you didn’t catch our previous edition featuring AI breakthroughs, you can find it here.
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