Verint Launches AI Blueprint
Verint announced a new offering, Verint AI Blueprint, which is designed to help companies launch conversational artificial intelligence solutions through a combination of consulting and technology.
Citing a PwC whitepaper, Verint says that 31% of business executives expect that Intelligent Virtual Assistants are the AI-powered solutions likely to have the largest impact on their business, but lack of AI expertise can be a huge barrier to implementation.
“We want to help companies understand that AI can provide great value to their organizations,” says Tracy Malingo, senior vice president of product strategy at Verint Intelligent Self Service. “Many companies are looking at AI as a silver bullet, as a way to automate everything—customer service, brand engagement, sales and commerce.”
But the technology in and of itself isn’t a solution that will fix everything, Malingo says. “What we want to do is to help companies determine if AI is the right answer and if it is, how you can be successful with it.”
The Verint AI Blueprint, which is being offered to customers and non-customers alike, provides machine learning and human expertise for a “prescriptive path” to help companies develop best-practice conversational AI initiatives with the best business impact, detailing areas of automation with the highest ROI potential—as well as information about top user behavior, sentiment, intents and conversation subject matter, existing customer pain points, and integration opportunities.
For $50,000, a Verint Blueprint AI user receives a one-month engagement that includes consulting and access to Verint conversational AI.
“The first thing that we do is work with companies to determine where friction exists, and what they need to do to solve it,” Malingo says. “A lot of times companies know they need to automate calls or chat, but they haven’t decided what they want to solve. We want to show them how AI can support that. It’s less about the technology than about helping a company understand the friction to improve AI within the enterprise.”
So the initiative is not so much about getting into the technical weeds of engines, run time, Ph.Ds, and scientists, Malingo says. Instead, the Verint AI Blueprint is designed to understand the opportunities as well as the strategy to help guarantee success.
Best practices for conversational AI, according to Malingo, include:
- Understanding the business problem that the business is trying to solve
- Having a separation of understanding and taking action. Sometimes businesses try to combine the two, but when they’re tied together, the end response can be wrong. For example, if an airline wants to build an automated response for assessing a fee without considering outside factors (a customer’s spending with the airline), the automated response might be wrong.
- Building and maintaining a robust data library
- Humans are important. Automating everything is not the best practice
According to Verint, using the AI Blueprint’s approach, enterprises have built IVAs and derived the following benefits:
- 83% deflection in live chat volume
- 44% cost reduction in the first year
- $1 million saved in customer service email costs in a single year
- 50% decrease in the amount of time it takes a customer to reset a password
- 27% reduction in live-chat costs
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