Future Tech
Zendesk | January 08, 2024
Zendesk today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Klaus, the industry leading AI-powered quality management platform. AI is driving a rapid increase in customer interactions and radically transforming the world of customer service. Customer service teams are being asked to increase their ROI by managing a rising volume of interactions while providing quality service, and increasing their organization's efficiency in the process. With Klaus, Zendesk customers will be able to deliver consistent, high quality service across every channel and across both human and digital agents (bots) – all while unlocking the power of everyday customer interactions to increase loyalty.
"As AI drives up the speed and frequency of customer engagement, only AI-powered quality assurance (QA) can keep up as companies work to identify and fix gaps in their customer service operations," said Adrian McDermott, chief technology officer, Zendesk. "The combination of Zendesk AI and Klaus' capabilities will help businesses navigate greater complexity and volume and ensure both digital and human agents deliver highly personal and empathetic service."
"Zendesk and Klaus share a vision of AI-led, personalized CX with businesses fully anticipating and acting on their customers' needs," said Martin Kõiva, CEO and founder, Klaus. "QA software plays a critical role in this, ensuring consistency, assessing both human and digital agent performance and providing actionable insights for strategic planning. As part of Zendesk, we will continue to build and deliver these crucial capabilities, but now at an even greater scale."
With digital agents resolving more service inquiries without human interaction, having a QA solution that analyzes both human and digital agent performance is crucial to maintaining quality control and providing best-in-class customer service. While most QA software is capable of only scoring 1 to 2 percent of interactions and cannot recognize systemic trends, Klaus' AI scores 100 percent of customer support interactions. It pinpoints conversations with positive or negative sentiment, identifies outliers, churn risk, escalations and follow-ups across all conversations – even those done by digital agents or outsourced teams. Klaus spots knowledge gaps and coaching opportunities that can be used to improve agent performance and productivity, all of which results in higher customer satisfaction.
WEM is a critical capability for today's customer service leaders. The acquisition of Klaus will be the latest addition to the company's existing workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions which includes Tymeshift, a modern workforce management tool built exclusively for Zendesk. The company acquired Tymeshift in June 2023. The acquisition of Klaus is anticipated to close in the first quarter of 2024 upon receipt of required regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.
About Zendesk
Zendesk is on a mission to simplify the complexity of business and make it easy for companies and customers to create connections. Our customer experience software unlocks the power of billions of interactions, enabling businesses to build rich, meaningful relationships with their customers. The company was conceived in Copenhagen, Denmark and today operates in more than 20 countries around the world.
About Klaus
Klaus is an AI-powered quality management platform that helps companies drive revenue through excellent customer service. Headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia, Klaus was founded in 2018 by Martin Kõiva, Kair Käsper and Egon Sale and has nearly 100 employees.
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Software
Persistent Systems | January 05, 2024
Persistent Systems (BSE: PERSISTENT) (NSE: PERSISTENT), a global Digital Engineering and Enterprise Modernization leader, announced a multi-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate the pace of innovation and development of generative AI solutions for clients. Persistent is a long-standing AWS Partner and has a proven track record of early scale generative AI adoption across multiple industry verticals leveraging services like Amazon CodeWhisperer and Amazon Bedrock. Amazon CodeWhisperer provides generative AI-powered code recommendations directly in multiple integrated development environments (IDEs) to help developers build applications quickly in more than 15 coding languages; Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that makes foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies accessible via an API to build and scale generative AI applications.
This strategic collaboration with AWS will help Persistent to further increase the impact it delivers to its clients that are embracing generative AI. Through this teaming, Persistent will have access to additional resources from AWS to build proofs of concept to help clients identify tangible business outcomes from generative AI. This will also support use case discovery and rapid build out of solutions with additional go-to-market funds from AWS. One of the key benefits to combined clients will be continued early access to AWS's generative AI services and investments that will help clients with their aspirations around growth, time-to-market, and better customer experience.
The Strategic Collaboration Agreement builds on Persistent's 30+ years of software engineering heritage, its best practices from more than 120 AWS engagements for cloud migration and modernization, and its 2,500 AWS practitioners to enable flexible and scalable generative AI-powered solutions tailored to clients' unique needs. Persistent's AWS Migration Competency status provides proven cloud expertise to help clients move successfully to AWS through all phases of complex migration projects. This collaboration reflects Persistent's proficiency in building robust cloud infrastructure, crucial in today's cloud-first, AI-first world, enabling clients to implement cloud-powered generative AI solutions.
These combined assets from AWS and Persistent can bolster the value provided to joint clients, helping them unlock the full potential of their technology investments.
Rajiv Sodhi, Senior Vice President – Hyperscaler Business & Strategic Alliances, Persistent:
"Enterprises across industries are looking to tap into the transformative potential of generative AI to reimagine, redefine, and rethink their business models for improved customer experiences and business growth. Combined with our newly acquired AWS Migration Competency status and our SCA, AWS will help us scale generative AI adoption among our clients so they can identify and implement use cases where this technology can have a real impact. We remain committed to helping clients reach their technology goals by leveraging the agility, breadth of services, and rapid innovation that AWS provides."
Quan Yang, Vice President of Research IT, Regeneron:
"Generative AI unlocks new opportunities to transform the life sciences industry. We are modernizing our legacy research applications to help accelerate the drug development process and simplify workflows. With Persistent's Digital Engineering expertise, powered by the AWS platform, Regeneron's research and pre-clinical development teams help bring our new life-savings drugs to market faster."
Chris Sullivan, Vice President, Worldwide System Integrator Partners, AWS:
"We are delighted to be working with Persistent to help our customers accelerate growth, enable business transformation, and enhance their digital experience. Together, we aim to redefine what's possible with generative AI, setting new standards for efficiency, innovation, and technological advancements."
About Persistent
With over 22,800 employees located in 21 countries, Persistent Systems (BSE: PERSISTENT) (NSE: PERSISTENT) is a global services and solutions company delivering Digital Engineering and Enterprise Modernization. As a participant of the United Nations Global Compact, Persistent is committed to aligning strategies and operations with universal principles on human rights, labor, environment, and anti-corruption, as well as take actions that advance societal goals. With 268% growth since 2020, Persistent is the fastest-growing Indian IT Services brand according to Brand Finance.
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General AI
Glassbox | January 11, 2024
Glassbox (TASE:GLBX), a leading provider of digital experience intelligence for web and mobile applications, today announced the availability of its enterprise-ready AI assistant, which the company has named GIA (Glassbox Insights Assistant). Glassbox turned to Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, which hosts OpenAI models fully within the secure Azure environment, to elevate the security and privacy standards of its previously announced AI assistant. In combination with Glassbox’s patented data privacy measures, users of the AI assistant can be confident that the conversational interface is protected with the level of rigor they expect from both Microsoft and Glassbox.
“We developed the AI assistant earlier based on OpenAI’s GPT model. However, our commitment to responsible AI and our exacting security, data privacy and compliance standards compelled us to turn to the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service for its additional protections for potentially sensitive data shared or accessed through the new generative AI (GenAI) interface,” said Glassbox co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Yaron Gueta. “GIA sets a new bar for what organizations should expect of GenAI solutions from their software providers.”
Glassbox captures millions or billions of digital experience data points for each of its customers every month that give them the richest possible set of data about their digital customer experience. GIA allows Glassbox users to uncover deep digital insights quickly and without technical knowledge or reliance on data and analytics teams.
“Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service is ideal for companies like Glassbox that need to deliver enterprise-grade GenAI solutions based on vast, proprietary datasets,” added John Montgomery, CVP, Azure AI at Microsoft. “By using the power of our generative AI capabilities, Glassbox’s AI assistant can deliver a better experience to customers with the security measures of Azure.”
With Gartner predicting that more than half of all successful technology solutions will be delivered to “nontraditional” buyers outside of IT by 2025, one of the pillars of Glassbox’s AI strategy is to make its unparalleled set of digital experience data more actionable, more quickly by more users for greater business impact. GIA is central to this strategy as Glassbox shifts increasingly towards natural language interfaces.
The use of GenAI to unlock digital insights is also a key step in realizing Glassbox’s Autonomous CX vision, which promises to revolutionize the customer experience domain by making digital experiences fully self-optimizing.
GIA is immediately available within the Glassbox digital experience intelligence platform when deployed in a customer’s preferred cloud environment.
About Glassbox
Glassbox (TASE:GLBX) reveals the insights that empower organizations to deliver better digital customer experiences. Our Digital Experience Intelligence platform automatically captures, visualizes and analyzes every digital journey in real time across websites and mobile apps. It serves as the unifying platform for product, UX, marketing, IT, analytics teams (and more) to assess performance, prioritize projects and optimize experiences. With unparalleled data privacy and security built in, hundreds of global customers across industries have chosen Glassbox to grow and optimize their digital businesses. Learn more at glassbox.com.
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