Bob Kent & Dustin Donaldson

Automation has been changing the customer experience (CX) for years with self-service and predictive routing. Artificial intelligence (AI), however, takes it to a whole new level. To understand this, we must first weed through some of the hype. For example, AI is not going to entirely replace your workforce.

As Leslie Willcocks, a professor at the McKinsey London School of Economics, stated, “AI will take the robot out of the human.” This means that AI will free workers from mundane, mind-numbing, repetitive tasks and allow them to concentrate on the more challenging and complex customer issues where they can take pride in adding value to the customer experience.

As we watched the successful launch of SpaceX Falcon Heavy, it struck us how fast technology was advancing. Think about it: Launching a 230 foot rocket with 27 engines. The boosters separate and nail a side by side landing back at the Cape. The coup d’état was sending Elon Musk’s Tesla on the way to Mars. That was unthinkable just a couple of years ago!

Believe it or not, our collaboration tools are evolving at warp speed too. The traditional PBX has rapidly evolved into an open architecture development platform that has the capability to radically improve the efficiencies of current workflows. Your company’s needs still drive solutions that include multiple vendors, and very likely a mix of cloud, hybrid cloud and on-prem solutions.