Genesys today
announced the availability of Genesys DX, a standalone digital customer engagement offering, at the company’s annual
Xperience user event. Genesys DX unifies the company’s customer experience (CX) expertise and Genesys AI—including predictive engagement from its
Altocloud acquisition—to enhance the conversational AI and dynamic knowledge base capabilities from the
Bold360 acquisition which closed in May. Genesys DX becomes the core platform for the
Genesys Digital and AI business unit headed by Barry O’Sullivan, executive vice president and general manager.
Think of this announcement as an update on both the digital business unit and the Bold360 acquisition. During a pre-briefing for industry analysts, O’Sullivan shared that the business unit has added 150 new colleagues to the team. O’Sullivan has also created a leadership team for the business unit that includes some executives from Genesys, some from Bold360, and new hires.
One of the new leadership hires is
Brett Weigl, senior vice president, product management, Digital and AI at Genesys. Weigl joined in May from Salesforce, where he worked in digital service engagement and Service Cloud product management. He came to Salesforce as part of the
ExactTarget acquisition. O’Sullivan commented, “Part of what Genesys wants to do across the customer journey is bring together sales, service, and marketing. Weigl brings a lot of capabilities in those areas.”
What does DX stand for? Think digital experience or digital transformation – the ambiguity is likely purposeful as many companies are working through an approach to both issues, and Genesys believes its DX platform can be part of the answer. “We think there's a large market of digital-first buyers outside the traditional contact center,” O’Sullivan said. “Our level of ambition is high here. We're looking to build a billion-dollar business over time for Genesys. We'll consider acquiring companies in this space as it makes sense and we're also investing heavily in our own innovation roadmap,” he continued.
Not surprisingly, when Weigl began talking about the Genesys DX platform, he said the company is “bringing together the best of both worlds” (see graphic below). From the Genesys Digital and AI group come capabilities such as “web messaging, which is the future of asynchronous chat; predictive engagement, which came from Altocloud; and new approaches to bot building and agent assistance,” Weigl said.
From Bold360, Genesys gets “some really differentiating technologies around advising agents, having a knowledge base, and AI and natural language understanding-driven experiences that can be applied for service but also sales scenarios,” Weigl said. He went on to laud the intuitive agent experience that drives productivity for digital agents.
While the DX graphic above shows a collection of features, Genesys is quick to point out that this is a net new platform that combines these features, and more will be built to extend the platform, to create something innovative and original to the market.
Genesys describes this solution as a centralized intelligent home for company knowledge that gets smarter over time and is infused with intelligence from the interactions that go through the system. “We want every step of service on digital to be powered with AI. We're looking for opportunities to deliver not only true predictive capability but also points of optimization throughout the process, backed with analytics, machine learning, and language insights,” Weigl summarized.
The themes described in the last quote from Weigl highlight those prevalent in the customer experience landscape today: digital, AI, predictive, analytics, and machine learning. These are topics that were prominent at the NICE Interactions event in May and Talkdesk’s Opentalk as well. As we have seen in just the past few months, they are also driving acquisitions: Genesys of Bold360, NICE of
MindTouch, and Cisco of
IMImobile.
The need to support hybrid work has become a driver of technology modernization in both enterprise communications and contact centers. Similarly, the dramatic shift to digital customer care and commerce has resulted in accelerating innovation. I can’t wait to see how companies begin bringing this technology to consumers.
The Genesys Xperience event is happening virtually June 23 and 24 and both O’Sullivan and Weigl will be speaking to provide more on Genesys DX.
Join us at Enterprise Connect this September to learn more about AI-enabled contact center capabilities. Register now using the promo code NJAL200 to save $200!
