Avaya Announces A.I.Connect Initiative to Boost Ecosystem of Artificial Intelligence Technologies for Enterprise Communications

SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired - October 31, 2017) - Avaya today announced a new focus with leading technology partners centered on speeding the development and application of artificial intelligence technologies (AI) in contact centers and unified communications for Avaya customers.

The A.I.Connect initiative will focus on enabling Avaya customers to deliver more engaging experiences for their own end customers, enhancing and integrating workflows with smarter, more personalized interactions through the use of AI and machine learning technologies.

AI offers significant opportunities to address many of the complexities and issues faced by companies in delivering an optimal customer experience. For example, it can enable companies to capture and utilize real-time customer sentiment to defuse or re-position situations that could lead to customer dissatisfaction. AI can also help them instantly organize vast amounts of available data input using predictive analytics to deliver optimal information in real time, where it can help achieve the most effective outcome or impact an ongoing customer interaction.

Through the A.I.Connect ecosystem, Avaya and its partnering technology firms will collaborate on creating the broadest set of technology options of AI capabilities for the next-generation digital customer experience built on and integrated into Avaya Oceanatm and Avaya Breezetm.

A.I.Connect will initially focus on five key areas:

• Effortless Self-Service, including adoption through conversational interfaces, and extending Bot-based interaction capabilities.
• Smart Routing, using Big Data and interaction history, as well as customer sentiment and other analytical/statistical measures, to provide pinpoint customer routing strategies.
• Agent Augmentation, to drive upsell/retention opportunities through proactive guidance and Next-Best-Action suggestions consistently across voice, video, chat, email and messaging channels.
• Interaction Insights, using trend spotting and sentiment analysis among other techniques to allow enterprises to elevate offerings and enhance business processes with improved best practices and voice-of-customer analytics.
• Enhanced Workforce Optimization, automating and improving QA and discovery of best practice models with the assistance of AI, as well as improving resource scheduling by predicting volumes and absentee rates within the enterprise.

A.I.Connect launches with a number of partners and will grow as more are added in upcoming months. Afiniti and Scoredata offer capabilities to analyze various data sets -- such as historical interactions, or data that is typically external to an enterprises' direct customer information, i.e. demographic information. They also use behavioral cues to simultaneously provide dynamic routing, agent script management, and cross-sell to customers. Nuance and Cogito augment those behavioral aspects with core capabilities for voice biometrics, live speaking guidance, sentiment analysis, and more to provide a higher level of agent performance and coaching. Nuance and Sundown.ai expand self-service capabilities with increased automation augmented with AI capabilities.

Partners like EXP360 extend the customer experience with Virtual Reality (VR) capabilities, giving agents new techniques for describing, explaining, and addressing customer issues. Arrow System Integration (ArrowSI), which is experienced in the delivery of complex, AI-enabled solutions for Avaya environments, complements the technical solution capabilities of other A.I.Connect partners.

More information on A.I.Connect can be found at www.avaya.com/aiconnect. Technology firms interested in joining the A.I.Connect ecosystem can request consideration through [email protected].

"Digital technologies have opened a door to the future that demands the close collaboration of an ecosystem to ensure workable solutions with tight integration. These A.I.Connect technology partners, as well as others to be announced in the coming weeks, will help ensure that investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning produce better customer and user experiences with long-term value and minimal disruption."
Eric Rossman, vice president, Alliances & Partnerships, Avaya

"We are excited to strengthen our relationship with Avaya by becoming an A.I.Connect partner. This partnership highlights the shift in the communication and collaboration marketplaces towards artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies as tools for enhancing enterprise profitability. Today, Afiniti's AI technology is delivering transformational levels of revenue, cost reduction, and customer satisfaction to our clients. Our increased collaboration with Avaya will further accelerate the pace at which our customers can drive shareholder value."
Zia Chishti, CEO, Afiniti

"Since the 2012 launch of Nina, the first virtual assistant for mobile customer service, Nuance has led the charge in bringing AI to customer engagement, including innovations in conversational AI, human-assisted AI and predictive targeting. As one of the A.I.Connect technology partners, we believe that the time has come where customer service can be more automated, more accurate and more convenient -- and where AI can help turn customer service into something consumers love."
Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Division, Nuance

"Adoption of AI/ML in the enterprise is all about making better decisions, increasing the value delivered to all customer touch-points in the omni-channel. ScoreData's proven AI platform and predictive applications have delivered dramatic improvement over traditional methods at customer engagement centers. ScoreData has been working with Avaya through the A.I.Connect ecosystem to deliver better net promoter scores, optimizations, and direct impact on the bottom line."
Vas Bhandarkar, CEO, ScoreData

About Avaya
Avaya enables the mission critical, real-time communication applications of the world's most important operations. As the global leader in delivering superior communications experiences, Avaya provides the most complete portfolio of software and services for contact center and unified communications -- offered on premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid. Today's digital world requires communications enablement, and no other company is better positioned to do this than Avaya. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com.

Certain statements contained in this press release are forward-looking statements. These statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "might," "plan," "potential," "predict," "should" or "will" or other similar terminology. We have based these forward-looking statements on our current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections. While we believe these expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections are reasonable, such forward-looking statements are only predictions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. These and other important factors may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. For a list and description of such risks and uncertainties, please refer to Avaya's filings with the SEC that are available at www.sec.gov. Avaya disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

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Source: Avaya Newsroom