Welcome to this week’s No Jitter Roll, our regular roundup of product news in the communication and collaboration spaces. This week, NJR highlights: Zoom's Workforce Engagement Management Suite which includes solutions for AI-powered scheduling and quality management; Amazon’s investment of up to $4 billion into Anthropic and the availability of Anthropic's LLM in Amazon Bedrock; IntelePeer’s launch of the SmartOffice virtual agent solution, and the partnership between Ooma and TouchTone for POTS replacement.
The collaboration platform provider announced its Workforce Engagement Management suite, including Workforce Management and Quality Management services, is now available for Zoom Contact Center customers. Both Workforce Management and Quality Management are integrated with Zoom’s CCaaS.
Zoom Workforce Management enables contact center managers to build four-week staffing forecasts via AI models based on call volume and handling time, among other factors. Schedules can be created from forecasted data and adjusted as data changes. Zoom WFM also monitors real-time adherence to those schedules and allows managers to respond to unplanned events and/or staffing needs.
Zoom Quality Management is a CX tool that allows managers to use AI and automation to evaluate customer interactions at scale with AI and automation. This includes identifying areas of improvement, key topics, coaching and training opportunities.
Analyst Sheila McGee-Smith evaluated how Zoom Contact Center is doing one year later. Next week, October 2-4, 2023, Zoom hosts its annual Zoomtopia event which No Jitter will be covering.
This strategic collaboration between Amazon and Anthropic (which developed the Claude 1 and 2 LLMs) includes an up to $4 billion investment by Amazon into Anthropic which will provide Amazon with a minority ownership stake in the artificial intelligence startup.
As part of the collaboration, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models. Moreover, the two companies will collaborate in the development of future Trainium and Inferentia technology.
AWS will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. Anthropic said it plans to run most of its workloads on AWS. AWS customers will receive access to future generations of its foundation models via Amazon Bedrock and enjoy early access to features for customizing Anthropic models such as using their own proprietary data to create private models.
Zoom has also invested in, and partnered with, Anthropic. As part of that May 2023 Series C funding round, Anthropic also received funding from “Google, Salesforce Ventures, Sound Ventures…and others.” Bret Kinsella with Synthedia wrote that with this Anthropic/Amazon pact Anthropic “added another tech giant champion to its team, which should help it gain trust among enterprise users and provide easy access to existing AWS customers.” For Amazon, he continued, saying that this deal gives its “AI chips a prominent endorsement and guaranteed training and inference volume. And it ensures Anthropic will not simply become another asset that Google Cloud can use to compete for AI business.”
The communications automation platform provider launched SmartOffice which enables regional offices and retail outlets to address customer queries and concerns without human intervention. This is accomplished via IntelePeer’s “virtual agent” technology, which uses AI and automation to integrate with an enterprise’s central database for contextual information, then provide information to customers when they contact the regional office. “SmartOffice can escalate and route customers to additional departments and knowledge workers throughout the organization while capturing communications in a central, secure hub or across business applications,” said IntelePeer CEO Frank Fawzi.
TouchTone, an integrated communications service provider, will offer Ooma AirDial for POTS replacement to TouchTone’s network of communications infrastructure providers, including those supporting alarm and safety monitoring companies. Ooma AirDial provides turnkey replacement for POTS lines by combining the Ooma AirDial base station with virtual analog phone service and a data connection through a wireless network. AirDial deployments can be remotely managed through an online portal with automated alerts.
Check out this article about planning for post-POTS and this one about the complexity of POTS replacement.
In case you missed them, here are some of our top stories:
