Every day, there are more and more advanced back-office and customer-facing technologies at the ready for businesses to modernize CX and CRM. The challenge that many decision-makers face isn’t just wading through the mind-numbing array of advanced technologies to deploy but whether or not they can see the extent to which their customers have moved away from current value-propositions and touch points. Brian Solis is a leading digital analyst, anthropologist and futurist. He has studied how customer behaviors, preferences, values and intent have evolved and how organizations are and aren’t keeping up. In his keynote presentation, Brian will share the world of experience through the eyes of the evolving customer and it how companies need to reverse engineer new perspectives, models, and journeys to stay relevant.

You already realize the importance of Millennials as consumers, but have you considered the impact they could make within your company? Contact centers are changing, with a new focus on handling complex and difficult interactions and “postchannel” strategies that erase your customers’ awareness of channels. Digitally fluent and social media-connected Millennials can be the ideal fit for chat, social, and mobile agent support. Learn how you can leverage this key demographic, along with innovative technologies, to enable the best possible customer outcomes.

ELIZA, one of the first chatbots ever built, was introduced more than 50 years ago, but it was not until Siri in 2011, Alexa in 2015, and Facebook’s Bots launch in 2016 that we saw anything close to mass market adoption of conversational assistants. Most technologies that start in the consumer world eventually reach the commercial enterprise, but should chatbots be treated as traditional projects? Chatbots are ushering in a new era of man-machine interaction—one that goes far beyond the now familiar “information retrieval” applications that rely on simple question-answer system constructs. As machines are starting to learn how to speak and to perform traditionally human functions, should we treat them more like humans? This is a new IT frontier. Is the goal to improve the human condition? These and other similar questions must be asked, but here is the big question: How do enterprises get this right?

Join your peers as we celebrate the grand opening of the Customer Solutions Expo. Visit with conference sponsors, exhibitors, speakers, and other attendees while enjoying light hors d’oeuvres and drinks.

Conversational interfaces, or intelligent “chatbots,” are defining entirely new categories of products and services. Deep learning technologies are empowering businesses to gain critical insights from unstructured text in transcribed calls, chats, and social media. Contact centers have been early adopters of these artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Customers can seamlessly communicate across channels with automated assistants that delight customers, providing them faster and better service. AWS is making AI more accessible, available, and easy to use, enabling customers to accelerate their usage of AI in contact center workflows. Learn how AI-powered applications are providing business value by rethinking traditional applications and transforming customer experiences, and how to leverage these innovations in your workflows instantly.

According to Forrester Research, nearly half of consumers already engage in automated conversations with intelligent assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Cortana. Keyboards, screens, and remote controls are being replaced by more intuitive ways of interacting with devices—most notably, voice communications. This presentation provides fresh insights into how you can use voice and AI to deliver differentiated customer experiences, streamline operations, and take advantage of new revenue streams.

Recent work has applied advanced NLP, machine learning, graph algorithms, and ontology work to automate transcripts for audio/video content. Transcripts are parsed and indexed for search and recommendations and also automatically summarized for editorial use. In particular, a human-in-the-loop design pattern, based on Jupyter notebooks and other open sources, was applied to improve results—blending AI apps with human expertise. Those results in turn have been used to develop conversational interfaces (Alexa, etc.) for speech applications and intelligent assistants that make learning materials more accessible. This talk presents how AI apps in media help resolve important issues for both editors and consumers.