Today’s CMOs and CIOs are challenged to deliver on the promise of a premium customer experience. 89% percent of companies expect to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience (Gartner). However, companies do not have a centralized System of Record for customer conversation data to identify conversation patterns and train agent assistants and chatbots. As a result, business analysts, data scientists, and bot developers are forced into a manual trial and error process that doesn’t fully leverage existing conversation data from disparate systems and results in a poor customer experience. Today, at Opus Research’s Conversational Commerce Conference, Discourse.ai unveils the first AI-based System of Record for Customer Conversations, which unlocks the value of customer conversation data.

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The state-of-the-art System of Record for Customer Conversations is part of Discourse.ai’s patent-pending Discourse.ai Cognition^TM platform, which includes a Conversation Graph data store, Conversation Insights for analyzing customer behavior, integration with common bot frameworks, and a RESTful API for predicting the next best action or intent and extracting entities using a proprietary financial services ontology. The Cognition platform ingests historical and real-time customer chat and transcribed voice conversations and then automatically classifies and annotates the data with semantic meaning, readying it for analysis and decision making by data scientists, developers and business analysts. Its Conversation Graph stores the organizational knowledge and customer content for all agent and chatbot conversations. It creates quality, automated conversations and transactions for customers and produces higher performing outcomes costing 90% less than current human-centric techniques.

“The Discourse.ai Cognition platform promises significant business value by providing a much needed conversation ‘system of record’ that makes the most of disparate data sources to support a broad spectrum of bots, virtual agents and intelligent assistants,” said Dan Miller, Lead Analyst & Founder, Opus Research.

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The team behind the Discourse.ai Cognition platform has extensive experience in governance, risk management and compliance, building secure systems that handle sensitive financial services data. This knowledge has been utilized to architect a secure conversational AI platform, and has driven an initial focus on large financial services companies.

The company was founded by Jonathan Eisenzopf, an expert in the Semantic Web, structured and unstructured knowledge extraction, speech recognition and natural language conversational systems who has worked with conversational systems for almost a quarter of the Fortune 100. Eisenzopf said, “Our research shows that only 30% of customer interactions are automated today. We are filling this void in the market with technology that solves the problems inherent with the process of automation. Every conversation a company will have today is probably well represented in all of the conversations they’ve had with customers to date. Since customer service agents are the front line of any company’s brand, they know how to have customer conversations better than anyone in the organization. It makes sense to harvest, centralize, and extend this expertise instead of starting from scratch, which is time consuming, expensive, and often frustrates users.”

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There is a vital need in the industry to reduce the time to value for automating customer service tasks. Discourse.ai allows organizations to have the right conversation with customers at the right time to deliver a customer experience that is unrivaled. By using the Cognition platform, Discourse.ai customers expect to reduce time to value from years to months.

Current automation technology requires a development team to spend several weeks to deploy a single intent. With large financial services companies averaging between 1,000 to 3,000 intents, it could take years to fully automate all human agent tasks. Now with the Cognition platform, Discourse.ai customers can create thousands of intents using existing call and chat conversations in as few as 12 weeks. Additionally, current chatbots on average support a max of four conversational turns before requiring human assistance. Discourse.ai has already proven performance of over 30 conversational turns before human assistance would be required, meaning a far greater success in automation and in context delivered by a chatbot that goes to a live agent.

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Key benefits of the Discourse.ai Cognition platform include:

• Automating the data enrichment process for data scientists, significantly reducing human annotation tasks.
• Automating intents drives dramatic cost savings and improved ROI.
• Intents can be created in approximately three months – a fraction of the time normally required – reducing time-consuming development cycles.
• Automating intents for chatbots helps businesses scale, without hiring new agents, and frees up customer service agent headcount to focus on more complex and personalized conversations with customers.

Discourse.ai’s platform can support all industries, and today is focused on serving large business-to-consumer financial services companies.

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