In an exclusive interview, Prasanna Arikala, CTO at Kore.ai discusses how Kore provides a software stack to configure, customise and deliver pre-built virtual assistants and build custom conversational automation.
What are some of the unique features of Kore.ai? Which sectors are growing?
Prasanna Arikala: Kore.ai allows large enterprise companies to build virtual assistants for automating their routine business interactions. With the help of Kore’s no-code platform, enterprises can design, build, test, train, deploy and manage virtual assistants in voice and digital communication channels. The platform supports both on-premise and cloud deployments for around 30 channels in over 20 languages.
The feature which differentiates Kore from others is Kore’s Conversational AI platform. It is easy to use and comes with a high level of sophistication of dialogue. It is because of the performance of natural language understanding (NLU) and NLU’s ability to leverage context intelligently to manage personalised conversations.
In terms of market expansion, we expect the most significant growth within the BFSI sector, as we are already working on the designs and structure of pre-built virtual assistants. Other growing sectors would be the aviation industry, hospitality management, transportation services, staffing agencies, telecom and logistics.
What are some of the customer pain points that Kore.ai addresses?
Arikala: A company’s performance is defined by the speed and quality of its interactions with customers and employees. In the case of large service-intensive businesses like banks, insurers, healthcare organisations or retail giants that are highly customer-centric and are facing a threat from “born-digital” competitors, this aspect becomes even more critical.
Generally, customers need to wait for a long time to resolve their queries through support. For such businesses, we automate support interactions through NLP-powered virtual assistants. Most businesses are aware of the problem but don’t have the resources to automate interactions in-house. We solve this problem by enabling enterprise customers to derive value through our no-code, easy-to-build, deploy-and-use software by eliminating unnecessary and unproductive back-and-forth between people and between people and technology.
Also Read: Intelligent Virtual Assistant Market to Witness Huge Growth by 2026
Could you tell us about the upcoming product upgrades that your customers can look forward to?
Arikala: In view of the changes in customer and employee behaviour, we are building our conversational AI technology and solutions to support aspects such as omnichannel multi-experience, self-service, proactive, intelligent, and personalised interactions.
In the next few quarters, we are focusing on enhancing the following key features, capabilities and functionalities: Conversational Designer, Digital Application Builder, Universal Virtual Assistant 2.0, Process Applications, NLU-powered RPA integrations, Analytics for Business KPIs, Cognitive Search Assistant, Live agent capabilities.
Global spending on AI is predicted to be more than $110 billion in 2024. However, 87 per cent of AI projects fail to even reach production. What’s your take on AI adoption and conversational AI?
Arikala: Some of the common reasons AI projects fail are customers having unreasonable expectations, data scarcity, and transparency. Also, the success of an AI project requires everyone involved in it to make it happen. The data scientists, IT engineers, domain experts and business users should work in unison to execute the problem holistically.
A few years ago, AI was still at its nascent state. It lacked sophisticated algorithms and model building mechanisms. Today’s AI is mature, sophisticated and self-evolving. AI today can process large datasets in real-time and continuously learn and evolve. When it comes to conversational AI, a lot of our customers, who used other conversational automation vendors before their use of our software, typically automation centre of excellence (CoE) leaders, customer service executives, and transformation/innovation professionals, have shared with us their experiences of chatbot deployments that fail to meet expectations: poor scalability due to NLP limitations, IT resources and integration challenges and poorly definer conversation flows and insufficient chatbot training.
To encapsulate it all, Kore helps its customers prevent such pitfalls with superior NLP and conversational intelligence, a no-code platform and industry-focussed virtual assistants.
Also Read: How is Conversational AI Powering Marketing and Sales
IVA has been a natural choice for the dissemination of information related to Covid-19. Many healthcare providers and governments, as well as WHO, are leveraging them to reach out to people. But IVA is still in the realm of early adoption, how is Kore.ai driving IVA innovation and adoption?
Arikala: The Kore virtual assistant platform was released in February 2016 and has been in production for over four years. The top four banks, top three healthcare businesses, and over 100 global 2000 companies have automated a billion interactions since the launch of Kore’s platform. Its pre-built industry and functional virtual assistants have made it easier and faster for these top-performing businesses scale the impact of front office automation.
The last 14 months have been prolific for the company in terms of adopting the platform and pre-built offerings.
Kore has won 17 global 2000 customers in the past six months.
Looking at a growing interest and demand for conversational AI technology solutions, Kore opened a dedicated office in Japan and Korea and has already won local businesses. BankAssist was conceived and developed during this time alongside IT Assist, and HR Assist with SmartAssist IVR capabilities to receive text and voice calls from customers and fulfil them.
How is Kore.ai keeping up with the increased market demand for AI-powered chatbots?
Arikala: Kore provides a conversational AI software platform that allows enterprise customers to design, build, test, train, deploy, and manage virtual assistants in any communication channel. Other critical components include speech recognition, analytics and the APIs and the integrations essential for scaling virtual assistants within an organisation.
In addition, Kore offers six ready-to-use, domain-trained virtual assistants configured on the Kore conversational AI platform for specific industries and functions within businesses: Bank Assist, Smart Assist, Search Assist, Work Assist, HR Assist and IT Assist.
What is the one quote that has stayed with you throughout your professional life?
Arikala: It’s by Albert Einstein, who once said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Knowing things and facts will help you start thinking, but to be able to indeed invent things or systems that were never seen before, you have to rely on your imagination and intuition and not get limited by the knowledge of the facts alone.
