Perhaps inevitably, AI was a continuing theme at Enterprise Connect this year, dominating both announcements from vendors and discussions among attendees. RingCentral Announces RingSense AI Platform, Zoom Announces New Features for OpenAIand NICE Launches Unique Generative AI Solution.
Given that most companies with multiple UC applications lack data integration across those applications, few are aware of how valuable the available AI-driven insights and use cases are. There is some debate.
Zeus Keravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK ResearchSaid UC Today The theory behind this wave of AI solutions is sound, and combining communication information with other information should enable smarter decision making. But Kerravala isn’t sure “whether most companies have enough data to integrate with telecoms and do that.”
“Look at the RingSense announcement,” said Kerravala.
“We’re going to combine Ring information with Zoho, Salesforce, ServiceNow and all these great applications. We’re going to give our sales and customer success teams great insights, but who likes Salesforce data? ?
“At the company I used to work for, a few salespeople joined the company because they ‘meeted a customer.'”
According to Kerravala, the most practical initial value for AI in the UC space is for the AI to listen to a call, summarize the meaning, record the call and the summary in a CRM software, and create a more useful dataset for the future. It is meant as an input mechanism that allows you to create a . AI that delivers more useful insights. “Theoretically, better AI will lead to better AI in the future (…) At this point, we don’t know if companies have the data and data disciplines in place to quickly develop valuable insights. not.”
After citing Adobe as an example of a vendor using generative AI to help content creators in the creative industry, Kerravala said there are other practical applications of generative AI in business settings as well. . For example, analyze data from past meetings with the same attendees to plan topics for your next meeting.
“AI can be used to improve the pre- and post-meeting experience,” says Kerravala. “Most vendors do a pretty good job during meetings. They have virtual backgrounds, transcription and translation capabilities. But what happens after the meeting is over? Help me get ready, and that’s where I see this thing having a pretty big impact.”
Keravala also believes AI has practical applications in contact centers, as announced by Webex and Microsoft at this year’s Enterprise Connect.
“I think a lot of the AI capabilities we can have for contact centers are paid items,” he added.
He argues that after the post-pandemic growth period resulted in a highly competitive UC market, companies began to realize the superior long-term economic value of contact centers. Organizations have much more potential…I think we are seeing a shift in the direction of more contact center driven companies. “