Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Christopher Connolly, VP of Solutions Strategy, Genesys (Part 1)

Chris discusses how rule-based systems are moving to learning-based systems in various enterprise use cases.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself and Genesys and what work you’re doing around artificial intelligence.

Christopher Connolly: I am the Vice President of our Solutions Strategy Group. Genesys is the number one customer experience platform. It enables companies to create exceptional omni-channel experiences and relationships. We’re pretty large. We’re based out of San Francisco. We’ve been around for about 25 years. We’re one of the top 50 privately-held software companies in the Valley.

At a certain point in Genesys’ history, we were a part of Alcatel Lucent. We were spun out from that. Our current investors are TCV and H&F. My role is to look over the horizon with a team of nine people specializing in certain domains including digital, AI, and VR. As you can tell, I’m not originally from the States. I grew up in Australia and I worked with Genesys in Australia for many years. I was lucky enough to make the transition across and move to New York for a little while and then down into the Miami area where I’m now based.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the types of customers and customer use cases where you’re using your AI technology.

Christopher Connolly: If you’ve ever talked to a bank via phone or email, you pretty much use Genesys at some point. A lot of our customers are large banks. That’s where we’re primarily known. We’re also expanding into the travel industry and hospitality as well as healthcare. The technology that we have historically is something called an omni-channel working engine. That is really part of our engagement platform.

The way we’re using AI is in a couple of different facets. One encompasses a variety of different technologies including natural language processing and natural language classification. We apply that to things like chatbots. The way that that interoperates with our platform in Genesys is that we have an orchestration engine that stitches together the human experience and the backend systems along with the text classification technology. That’s one very concrete and very obvious scenario that most people are familiar with.

There have been some tremendous advancements in text processing over the last couple of years. There are certainly more to come. The way that you see that manifested in our customer base is that you’ll see automated experiences. That proactive notification that you get when your flight is delayed sometimes uses Genesys technology. We might be looking at patterns in customer behavior, taking those signals, and using those signals to create an engagement with that customer.

That engagement might be as simple as a text notification or it could be something more sophisticated like getting you in touch with a human and then augmenting that human experience with what we call blended AI. This is a separate domain that we’re focusing on where we’re blending artificial intelligence and machine learning to augment the employee experience within an organization and really enhance their experience. It’s almost like having a bot that is able to guide you through different processes and experiences. Having that blended AI experience is a huge focus area.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Christopher Connolly, VP of Solutions Strategy, Genesys
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