When it Comes to Artificial Intelligence, Practical is Powerful

You can’t talk about technology today without Artificial Intelligence (AI) entering the conversation. I would venture a guess that you can’t talk about much without AI popping up. It’s everywhere. It’s in your smart TV, your car, even in your vacuum cleaner. And when we talk about AI in these products it always seems as though it’s all about the flash and sizzle, which is great. But is it getting the job done? 

Five9 has engineered AI into our Intelligent Cloud Contact Center solution, however we have taken a very different approach. We offer practical AI applications that don’t make customers feel as if they are running a research project. Five9 conversational AI solutions focus on solving problems like reducing time spent on after call work, improving call handling times and offloading low value calls to self-service, which can produce measurable ROI right away. 

Five9 recently introduced two new AI-based products that deliver practical outcomes – Five9® Agent Assist and Five9® Virtual Assistant, powered by Google CCAI, which is part of the Google Cloud Platform.   

But what is Practical AI?  

Practical AI means three things to us at Five9.  

First, it’s focused on tangible business outcomes, with the emphasis on tangible. We mean that you can understand the objective the product is trying to deliver, and you can measure the business benefit of it. For example, in our AI benchmarks, customers using Agent Assist are able to actually prove the ROI by calculating the minutes saved in during- and after call work by their labor rates and other metrics which help make a business case.  

Second, it handles AI’s mistakes. If there is one thing you need to understand about AI technologies – it is while they are powerful and useful, the algorithms are not perfect and make mistakes. That means AI solutions need to be built, from ground up, to handle those mistakes. For instance, if you are searching for a picture of a cat and the AI thinks a picture of a dog is a cat and presents the dog to you, it’s no big deal - you ignore the result. However, if a customer says, “I wanna remove that order,” and the AI interprets it as, “I approve that order,” that could become a very consequential business outcome. Our practical AI works in real-time and is extremely precise with call transcription and summarization. Our Agent Assist allows the agent to quickly confirm the accuracy of call summaries before they are placed as a record in the CRM, and as the agent performs this action the system learns from that and gets better over time. 

Finally, practical AI means the product is accessible for any business – small or large. The largest enterprises can afford to hire AI engineers or teams of data scientists to help train the models and analyze the results; or they typically have budget for large-scale AI implementation projects that take six months or more. To be ‘practical’ – the implementation and ongoing costs both need to be reasonable to accommodate any size business without the need to hire more expensive talent or consultancies. 

Bottom line, ‘Practical AI’ means - no hype. No buzz words. No jargon. No false promises. Just tangible, accurate business results for companies of any size or scale. 

To learn more about how Five9 Agent Assist and Five9 Virtual Assistant apply these principles of Practical AI simply click on the links to read more.