Ai: Irl

When a company rolls out self-service capabilities, they have to be deliberate. Keeping use cases narrow is the way to go at first. It's something that Patrick Quinlan, Senior Manager for Self-Service and Analytics at Citrix, has found out firsthand. In this one, Patrick shares how Citrix has rolled out a chatbot on their site—but also how KCS (Knowledge-Centered Support) is just as important as their customer-facing tech.

One of the primary ways any SMB can impact their online presence is by leveraging the power of SEO. On this episode of AI:In Real Life, we interviewed Rich Fong, CEO of Bliss Drive. Bliss Drive has a simple mission with a challenging task: Help businesses increase sales and leads by delivering incredible SEO results. We asked Rich for his top 5 SEO insights for SMBs. We wanted the most return for the least amount of effort. Here's what he said.

There was a time when all the transactions of companies and their buyers were episodic. That time is past. With the proliferation of so many digital touchpoints, you no longer have to wait in line to speak to someone from a company. You can get instantaneous feedback from social media, WhatsApp, etc. It's a challenge for companies to rise to that expected level of service. How can you do it? Listen in to hear Paddy Srinivasan, SVP Products and General Manager at LogMeIn, tell you. Also, be sure to check out CXNext, an upcoming event demystifying AI and machine learning.

The pharmaceutical industry is a lot like Texas. Everything is bigger there. Development costs are in the billions of dollars. Drug trials can last as long as a decade because they can't find enough patients. On the most recent AI:IRL podcast, I spoke with Amitabh P. Mishra, President and Global CTO at Emcure Pharma Group, about how AI is changing his business and other industries as well. Mishra believes that artificial intelligence has the potential to facilitate every stage of the clinical trials process from matching eligible patients with studies to the data collection processes.

When the cost of drug development has increased a few hundred fold, how do find a way to cut expenses and time? AI to the rescue, according to Crystal Black, Director of Marketing Programs for Saama Technologies. The tonnage of data is mind-boggling: Patient monitoring devices produce over 86,000 readings per day. By 2025, 70% of clinical trial participants will be using wearable technology, creating even more data. There are 2 billion data points in a typical phase two trial that runs for six months with a hundred patients. That equals 200 billion data points. To learn how AI will help cut through all this data, listen to the podcast.

Which is a better therapist, an AI app or a human? According to two recent studies, an app is just as good and in some cases better than a human therapist. The app is called Woebot, a friendly AI powered chatbot that delivers cognitive behavioral therapy at scale to make such therapy much more accessible. In our latest AI:IRL podcast, we spoke with Woebot CEO and Co-Founder Alison Darcy, a clinical research psychologist out of Stanford University about why the app works so well. Woebot solves the issue of accessibility in three ways.   By being an app, it is always in your pocket and always available, it lowers the barrier to entry. You can get help the moment you need it. Unlike a human, Woebot can scale to serve many more people 24/7 for a few pennies worth of additional server space. It reduces stigma. The app moves people toward the idea that everybody has mental health and everybody must tend to it regularly. Think of it less as therapy, and more like the very popular meditation and brain-training

What can conducting a symphony orchestra teach you about AI? Plenty, according to Lukáš Kovař�k, symphony orchestra conductor and CEO & Founder of the AI consulting firm Bohemian AI. Kovař�k was a guest at our latest AI: IRL podcast. AI hype is everywhere. For Kovař�k the problem is baked into the name itself. You don't often hear someone in any industry begging for the creation of a standards board to give needed transparency, but that's what Kovař�k believes will help educate the marketplace. He wishes for truth in labeling that would let AI customers know exactly what they're buying with industry standards that everyone agreed were tested and independent. People can't tell the difference between real AI and fake AI. They need to have marketing that's grounded in reality.

In the final chapter of our three-part deep dive into improving your company's customer engagement maturity model, we look at the customer engagement maturity level tactics you can deploy right now. This week we conclude our conversation with Ross Haskell and Amber Gregorio from LogMeIn's Bold360 team about the Customer Engagement Maturity (CEM) Model Assessment they developed with Forrester Consulting.   You can find the amazing results of their research in their report Build Competitive Advantage Through Customer Engagement and AI on the Bold360 website. Deploying AI was the number one difference for those who saw the largest ROI.   AI is not going to replace people, but what it can do is it can help you to offload some of the more mundane tasks so that your people can do the really high value stuff. Things that require empathy, understanding persuasion maybe in a selling kind of environment.

How would you like a tactical advantage for your company that allows you to outpace your competition by an ever-widening margin, year after year? A recent two-year survey of 450 companies revealed that the higher a company's customer engagement maturity model, the faster it outpaces its competition across key metrics, with the gap increasing year after year. This week we spoke with Ross Haskell, Lead Evangelist for Bold360 at LogMeIn, and Amber Gregorio, Senior Product Marketing Manager at LogMeIn, about a model they've developed with Forrester Consulting to help companies understand where they are in the customer experience spectrum. One of the silver bullets that helps improve companies at all levels of customer maturity is deploying AI into their customer workflows. Technologies like AI help a business become more efficient. Those companies that have already piloted and implemented AI are accelerating at a much faster pace than those that have not. Unfortunately, the data confirms that those setbacks compo

Thinking holistically about the customer experience journey can have a huge impact on the bottom line. Experts on the customer engagement maturity curve are 30% more likely to have double digit growth than companies with less advanced strategies. One of the challenges that companies face in closing the customer engagement maturity gap, is silos of people and technology. That manifests itself when customers who deal with one department are transferred to another area and they have a very different experience. Ross Haskell, Lead Evangelist, Bold360ai at LogMeIn, has a lot of expertise in helping companies deliver better customer experiences. Amber Gregorio, Senior Product Marketing Manager at LogMeIn, has a number of years of experience in the financial services industry.

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning deliver serious ROI when you're dealing with large data volume, but sometimes you need to know when a human should intervene. There are also times when human marketers need to give up a little control to let the AI help drive the conversion process. Finding that happy medium is an ongoing challenge according to Jaime Romero, Global Head of Marketing and Customer Delivery at MRP, a leading global predictive intelligence organization, combining cutting-edge predictive analytics with a full suite of account-based marketing services to acquire new customers, faster. In this episode of the podcast, you'll learn: Quantification Challenges Where AI Can Lead Where AI Needs Your Help

How helpful are the chatbots on your website? Are they good for resetting a customer's password but not much else? Brian Bagdasarian, Senior Manager of Digital Engagement & Conversational Marketing Strategy here at LogMeIn, was not satisfied with that kind of chatbot. That's why we brought him on to develop the conversational and digital engagement experience for each of our product families. His goal is very simple: make it simpler to start using the product and become a customer. Because he believes it's possible to have a chatbot that can help you figure out which product is the best fit for you, what kind of plan you should be on and how to use the features in each tool. We'll, it's possible when you have the right team. On today's episode of AI: IRL, Brian walked us through the 3 people you want on your chatbot development team.  

On the latest episode of AI: In Real Life, I sat down with Yoav Barel to talk about the opportunities, challenges, and successes we're seeing in the conversational AI space. Yoav is an industry leader who's been at the forefront of customer experience for quite some time. From personal interactions in store, to the app revolution, to now, when conversational interactions occur through chat bots, Yoav has been there for it all. He's also the CEO and Founder of the Chatbot Summit, a community and conference series dedicated to conversational experiences.  

We've all read about how Wall Street firms have invested billions in AI and machine learning. What about financial AI for people on Main Street? To find out, I spoke with Bharath Kadaba, Chief Innovation Officer at Intuit. Intuit's brands include personal finance products like Quicken and Mint, business accounting software like Quickbooks, and TurboTax the #1 best-selling tax preparation software to file taxes online. Of course, the company is on the cutting edge of AI. In the podcast you'll learn: Where AI excels. The future of taxes. Your personal virtual CFO. The dawn of the conversational, empathic AI. AI's greatest trick: Making itself disappear.

You may not think of your Human Resources department as a center of innovation but HR is using tools like AI to focus on how to develop people, acquire new talent, and other ways to better engage with employees. To find some of the latest cutting edge insights in HR, I recently spoke with Jo Deal, the chief human resource officer at LogMeIn, a computer software company in Boston.

What if there was a way to make your retirement planning as easy as ordering an Uber? Sunil Gangwani, co-founder and CEO of Plootus, has created this magical, machine learning app. Plootus is an AI app that offers millennials (and others) simple, automatic retirement planning. The free app is available for download on both IOS and Android. Once you link your various accounts to it, this app looks at where you are in life, your location, your employer's retirement options, even your daily spending habits and devises a simple, automatic retirement plan.   

"We launched version 1 on Alexa. If a customer's tracking started with '1z' They could never track their package. Alexa would look up baby onesies." Creating chatbots is a frontier. It's new and there is a lot to consider. Fortunately, my guest Qing Cao, in addition to being a certified Lean Six Sigma black belt, is the leader of the customer-facing, emerging technology product development team at UPS. On this episode of AI:IRL she joins me to unpack the different ways you can build a bot to fit your situation and defining your purpose and asking guiding questions for decision-making. We also discuss how language, platforms, and regions affect scale and team size, the importance of listening to the customer, the future of bot training with machine learning, and having a test-and-see mentality.

At this point every brand knows the power of social for brand awareness. But often the incoming data from customers and the potential it gives companies is either not known or unharnessed. Many companies try to use the same team responsible for the outgoing messaging to handle the incoming. But the incoming is so data heavy. AI needs to be specialized at handling that flood of information so it can maximize the talents of the human support team. Luckily there's Tim Lopez. He's the TSIA Director of support services and social research. His company provides best practices and industry standards to brands looking to maximize their support teams with AI. Tim's expertise lies in understanding the way that brands can not only use AI for building their brand awareness, but for creating an enhanced support team in a data heavy social media environment. This post is based on a podcast with Tim Lopez from TSIA. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to AI: IRL. If you don't use iTunes, you can

Incremental results get disrupted by smaller, more agile, often invisible companies. How do large businesses transform to stay ahead of the disruption? We hear a lot about digital transformation. But what does that mean? And how do you companies make changes that are transformative and not simply additive? Sid Raisoni, being the Head of Analytics at Nestle Waters, is an expert on the subject of big company digital transformation In this episode of AI: IRL, he unpacked: what transformation truly is, an analytics-focused 5 step transformation strategy, and how employees can drive transformational change.

Chatbots are everywhere these days. It seems like you can't log into any sort of SaaS website without seeing that little popup window in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen saying something to the effect of: "How can I help?" But are those chatbots actually helpful? Are they actually doing what the customers are wanting? And is there a limit to what a bot can help the customer accomplish vs what an actual human can do?