No Jitter Roll: Twilio Launched a Bevy of CustomerAI Products, Emplifi Debuts Unified Analytics, Gupshup Intros Domain-specific LLMs, VMware and NVIDIA Partner to Provide Gen AI Platform

Welcome to this week's No Jitter Roll, our regular roundup of product news in the communication and collaboration spaces. This week, NJR highlights Twilio’s launch of multiple CustomerAI products across its CX, personalization, voice and marketing solutions, including the incorporation of generative AI; Emplifi announced a unified analytics component to provide a single view of business and customer data; the conversational messaging platform Gupshup introduced domain-specific LLMs for functions like marketing, commerce, support across industries; and VMware and NVIDIA extended their partnership to a generative AI software/hardware platform for enterprises.

Twilio Launches Bevy of New CustomerAI Tools

The provider of customer engagement solutions has launched multiple AI-powered products. With the CustomerAI Predictions, powered by Twilio Segment, marketers can create hyper-targeted audiences, trigger customer journeys, and personalize multichannel experiences based on a customer’s lifetime value (LTV), etc. Predictions is globally available now for Twilio Unify and Twilio Engage customers. For the voice channel, Twilio’s Voice Intelligence uses natural language understanding (NLU) to reports on trends like common feedback, competitive insights, and compliance risks. Twilio Flex and Voice customers can also manage regulatory requirements with automated personal information (PII) redaction. Voice Intelligence is in public beta now with general availability scheduled for 2024.

In 2024, Generative AI will become available inside Twilio Engage and Segment. Within Engage, for example, Twilio will offer Generative Email that will enable users to create HTML-formatted email. Generative Journeys will allow users to describe the type of campaign they want to build (promotional, win-back, etc.), define their audience and channels to use, and Twilio Engage will build the customer journey via generative AI. 

At launch, the generative models that are powering these Twilio products natively include:

• Flex (Agent Assist) is currently leveraging Google/CCAI. In June 2023, Twilio announced a native integration between Google CCAI and Twilio Flex that can be used to create AI-powered virtual agents that can offer conversational self-service interactions.
• Engage/Segment (Customer AI Generative Journeys/Email) is currently leveraging OpenAI.
• Voice Intelligence also leverages OpenAI.

At a later time, Twilio says there will be greater flexibility for businesses to select the LLM they want, or they can bring their own.

Twilio has also introduced Zero Copy Architecture in partnership with Databricks and Snowflake. Essentially, this new product will allow customers to push down query processing to the data warehouse or data platform directly without having to copy data or perform ETL (“Extract-Transform-Load”) jobs. 

In the coming months, Segment B2B Edition with Linked Profiles will roll out globally. With this product, companies can build a “graph” of relationships linking customer events, experiences, and profiles with existing data (e.g., company accounts, subscriptions, products, households). Companies will be able to potentially train AI models and create new segmentations and personalized recommendations.

Want to know more?

• Twilio has published its approach to trusted CustomerAI.
• Twilio has also published AI Nutrition Facts labels which resemble the nutrition labels on packaged foods. The labels are “intended to give consumers and businesses a more transparent and clear view into ‘what's in the box’ – how their data is being used – especially when it comes to training LLMs with vendors like AWS, Google, and OpenAI.” 

Emplifi Unveils Unified Analytics for Insights into the Customer Journey

The customer engagement platform provider launched Unified Analytics, a feature that aggregates, analyzes, and presents customer data across social media, customer service and care case management data, along with Voice of Customer (VoC) insights, and influencer marketing analytics. The data resides in one central repository with visualization tools that can be used to create graphs and charts. Unified Analytics is available as part of the Emplifi Customer Engagement Platform.

Gupshup Launches Domain-Specific ACE LLM to Transform Conversational Experiences

Gupshup provides domain-specific, fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) to automate the creation of enterprise-grade chatbots. It has launched ACE LLM, a family of domain-specific LLMs specialized for functions such as marketing, commerce, support, HR & IT, and industries like banking, retail, utilities and more. It is built upon foundation models such as Meta's Llama 2, OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo, Mosaic MPT, Flan T-5, and others. ACE LLM generates text in 100+ languages and is available in 7 to 70 billion parameter sizes.

ACE LLM incorporates “guardrails” to eliminate irrelevant, out-of-context responses. When combined with a company's knowledge base, these guardrails provide a “lift in accuracy levels and transparency make the output ready to handle dynamic user conversations.” The LLM also supports enterprise-level controls for accuracy, source data boundaries, tone, auditing, teach mode for non-generative responses, automated testing, and analytics. ACE LLM is available in the Gupshup public cloud and offers deployment options with support for geo-specific data residency or scalable private cloud (VPC) in the enterprise.

VMware and NVIDIA Unlock Generative AI for Enterprise

VMware and NVIDIA have expanded their partnership to create the VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA. The goal of this partnership is to enable enterprises to customize models and run generative AI applications, including intelligent chatbots, assistants, search and summarization. Some of the hardware providers that will be a part of the Private AI Foundation include Lenovo, Dell and HPE.

Launching in early 2024, the offering will be a fully integrated solution featuring generative AI software and accelerated computing from NVIDIA that is built on the VMware Cloud Foundation. 

• VMware also announced the Private AI Reference Architecture for Open Source to help customers achieve their AI goals with open-source software (OSS) technologies. Some of the companies involved include Anyscale, Domino Data Lab, Hugging Face, Intel and systems integrators such as Wipro and HCL.

Want to know more?

• Kyndryl and Microsoft partnered to launch an AI-readiness program, as NJ reported on August 11, 2023.
• And in early July 2023, NJ reported that NEC announced its Generative AI Service and Hub which will help enterprises implement AI.

These partnerships are not the same as what VMware and NVIDIA have announced, but they do suggest a trend toward partnerships and alliances that help unlock generative AI’s value for enterprises.

This Week on No Jitter

In case you missed them, here are some of our top stories:

• Avaya is Back: The company’s post-bankruptcy strategy has a laser focus on CX while deprecating PBX and UCaaS.
• AI-Enabled Chatbots & Virtual Assistants Show Promise, but Have a Ways to Go: Chatbots only resolve 16% of customer interactions, on average.
• Conversations in Collaboration: Genesys’ Brett Weigl on how generative AI can assist contact centers: Genesys’ SVP and GM talks about how current AI implementations and generative AI can be used to improve the customer and agent experience.