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IoT: All Things Considered
Regarding the second fundamental trend, IoT, Turgeon said he wants everybody to understand one thing: "Avaya understands 'things.'" In fact, he said, Avaya platforms support hundreds of thousands, if not nearly a million, things already.
"Now you can you can debate till you turn blue, 'Is a phone a thing? Is a digital phone a thing?' I say, 'Yes,'" he added. "Those things can be part of the entire ecosystem, so we have to make sure that everybody understands, and this is critical, as our customers want to transform and build a digital experience, we have to embrace what these 'things' are."
And those things are generating scads of data that's being collected, analyzed, and turned into intelligent output. What comes next -- what you do with that content -- is critical. "Well guess what," Turgeon said, "Avaya brings dial tone to IoT."
An environment comprising sophisticated computation, the omnichannel contact center, an integrated communications ecosystem, and IoT support enables the ability to deliver real-time contextual analytics information for smarter decision making on, say, routing contact center calls, Turgeon said. And so, he encouraged attendees, don't just think of Avaya for cloud, but for IoT, too.
Of course, IoT without AI isn't much good, as Philonenko noted. The connected car has become a bit of a cliché, he added, but still serves as a great example, considering all the sensors, computers, networks, and connections -- car to factory, car to car, car to road, car to temperature, car to parking, and so on. But how do you go from sensing that something requires action to triggering the workflow to take that action? "That is really where the power of the applications platforms we do will come into play."
Furthering the use case example, Turgeon noted that connected cars in Europe will soon be required to initiate communications with a contact center as soon as an airbag deploys. From the contact center, a voice call will automatically be initiated to the car and, through analyzing data pulled from this call, as well as other connected cars in the vicinity and real-time mapping, the contact center will also automatically know to dispatch one or more tow trucks to the scene.
IoT integration doesn't stop at the contact center, however. The boundaries between the contact center and UC are blurring, and the ability to bring in third-party analytics is imperative, making platform openness critical. Whether you're a contact center agent, a knowledge worker, or a business executive, "at the end of the day we are all trying to solve problems for customers," Philonenko said.
Advancing AI
As evidenced in the A.I.Connect program for developers launched last fall, Avaya is serious about openness and AI, Philonenko said. The Nuance voice biometrics integration mentioned above is one example of the value in creating an open AI platform, as is the "intelligent wire" capability that Avaya gains in the Spoken acquisition.
This intelligent wire solution analyzes contact center voice calls in real time, turns them into text, and delivers summaries to applications such as Salesforce, as Spoken CEO Mohamad Afshar described earlier from the keynote stage. This changes the economics of the contact center, reducing manual work required of contact center agents, while providing "unbelievable insight into what customers are really saying and how agents are handling interactions," he said. Intelligent wire, which of course runs in the cloud, offers an industry first, he added -- a communications platform and a voice-based AI platform integrated into a single offering.
And that more or less summarizes Avaya's goal with AI. "Our mission is to expose data in ways that make it easy to understand and then automate and predict," said Philonenko, calling out the "two sides to AI." You have to be able to ask the question: "What do I do next based on what I know?"
Hear more from Avaya during an Industry Vision Address at Enterprise Connect 2018, March 12 to 15, in Orlando, Fla. Register now using the code NOJITTER to save an additional $200 off the Early Bird Pricing or get a free Expo Plus pass.
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