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“I think the companies that get it right will be the ones which blend digital technologies more generally,
but specifically AI, with people but allow AI to support the interaction.
Stuart Dorman, CIO of Sabio
Comms Business Live:
Transformations Ahead
In the latest episode of Comms Business Live Editor David Dungay was joined by Stuart Dorman, CIO of Sabio and
James Parton, Strategic Partner Manager at IBM Security, to talk about market developments in 2019 and beyond.
Artificial Intelligence was top of the agenda!
DAVID DUNGAY: WHAT KINDS OF
DIGITISATION ARE YOU SEEING IN
THE MARKET?
STUART DORMAN: Almost all of our
clients are undergoing some kind
of digital transformation initiative
of some sort. We are certainly
playing a part in that for many
of our clients. We saw a huge rise
in the use of conversational user
interface technology last year,
chat bots virtual assistants and
those kinds of things. What’s
happening is organisations are
trying to enable more stu to
be done on their websites and
digital channels with an objective
of becoming more ecient,
shrinking the size of the contact
centre, and becoming more
responsive to their customers.
We see conversational UI, or AI
technology, as a real enabler of
that.
JAMES PARTON: e way it aects
my day to day role is ensuring
the work we are doing with
our partners means they have
security built in those digital
transformation strategies. I
think security is one of those
things which underpins any key
change.
DAVID DUNGAY: WHERE ARE WE ON
THE AI JOURNEY?
STUART DORMAN: We are still
right at the beginning of that
AI journey. Lots of solutions
that we are delivering now
leverage AI in some shape or
form. e exciting thing for us
right now is the pace at which
we are seeing natural language
recognition developing,
underpinned by machine
learning. Companies like
Microsoft, Nuance, Amazon
and Google are providing APIs
that are allowing us to create
completely new ways of using
speech recognintion technology
to enable digital transformation.
Equally we are seeing the use
of machine learning as a way of
understanding or interpreting
all the data which is being
created as a result of the digital
transformation programmes we
are seeing. Really, the only way
to do anything meaningful with
that data is to apply machine
learning to it and to do real
time actions based on that data.
It’s a really exciting space for us
right now.
JAMES PARTON: AI is one of
IBM’s big bets as a whole.
If you look at what the
organisation is doing with AI
it is encompassing a huge part
of what we are doing. We have
business units now, Watson
Health, Watson Customer
Engagement and it just shows
how important that is to us as a
company. It comes back to the
data explosion and particularly
unstructured data. With
regards to security specically,
we have something called
Watson for Cybersecurity.
is is essentially a machine
learning supercomputer and it
helps to very quickly interpret
the unstructured data which
normal security analysts would
not be able to make sense of
in the time they have to make
a decision to either escalate a
potential breach, an alert, or
not. A lot of our partners are
coming to us and seeing this an
added benet IBM can oer.
DAVID DUNGAY: WHAT DOES AI
MEAN FOR THE SKILLS MARKET?
JAMES PARTON: ere are not
enough skilled people in the
industry and there are only
going to be more vacancies over
the coming years. ere is a real
need to leverage things like AI
and machine learning to do a
lot of the roles we don’t have the
people for.
STUART DORMAN: I agree, in our
world of customer experience
and call centres we will see
some of those low value
interaction disappear through
the introduction of AI but
what that leaves is much higher
value richer interactions to be
handled by people. I think the
companies that get it right will
be the ones which blend digital
technologies more generally,
but specically AI, with people
but allow AI to support the
interaction.
22 | Comms Business Magazine | January 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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