The ways customers interact with businesses have drastically changed in previous years.
From the early days of face-to-face interactions, phone calls and contact centres, the customer service experience has evolved exponentially.
Shifts in consumer behaviour and advancements in technology are both catalysts for change.
Experts predict that 85% of customer interactions will be handled without human agents in 2021, the vast majority of those handled by chatbots and virtual assistants.
Why? The traditional means of servicing customers struggle to provide the type of experience that modern consumers demand. Customers now expect a faster, more engaging, and personalised level of service than ever before.
Chatbots, or Digital Employee's as they’re also called, is capable of having thousands of simultaneous conversations with a variety of different users.
That’s a lot of information gathered about your customers’ needs and wants.
In a world that’s ruled by data, that information is a golden opportunity to improve the way you interact and engage with both potential and existing customers.
As consumer behaviours change and become more digitally orientated, retailers must evolve the way they interact with and support their customers, or risk being left behind.
Leading retailers are turning to artificial intelligence and automation to streamline customer service processes amidst a growing increase in digital based customer enquiries.
With the complete absence of face-to-face customer interaction that has occurred as a result of COVID-19, many companies have been forced to rethink their strategy and many are making a complete shift to servicing customers digitally.
Auckland, New Zealand - 12 MAY, 2020 - New Zealand veterinary clinics coping with Covid-19 conditions now have access to a Digital Employee – one that’s willing to work 24/7 without a break.
The COVID-19 pandemic has suddenly thrust digital transformation to the forefront of business needs.
Ambit has made available a COVID-19 advice chatbot at cost. This will be centrally maintained and updated as required. Various options are available. Please contact us if you would like to know more.
Ambit recently featured in NZ Business Magazine where Tim Dacombe-Bird, NZ Country Manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS), was interviewed. He calls out Ambit as an example of a Kiwi tech startup achieving rapid growth and success leveraging AWS services in the build of our leading Conversational AI platform.
AUCKLAND, New Zealand - December 10, 2019 - Parents will soon get easier access to advice provided by clinical psychologists Nigel Latta and Natalie Flynn thanks to a new partnership with New Zealand tech company Ambit. The relationship will see Ambit’s conversation platform used in the new Parentland app to be launched early next year.
Ambit Co-founder, Josh Comrie, recently sat down with AI Time Journal to share his insights on how enterprises can start their Conversational AI strategies by identifying the pain points in their business processes and interact with their customers using virtual agents and chatbots.
Auckland, 1 November 2019 – Technology Investment Network (TIN) has named Ambit one of the top ten most promising NZX Early Stage Companies featured in this year’s TIN Report, launched at a gala awards event in Auckland.
Despite acknowledging the value that AI technology has to offer, stats suggest many enterprise organisations are still lagging behind in its adoption.
Auckland, New Zealand - 11 September, 2019 - Conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) company, Ambit, is partnering with Reobot Limited, who have created a conversational chat experience to help kiwis improve and practise te reo Māori.
The early emergence of Artificial Intelligence is largely credited to computer scientist Alan Turing, who, in 1950, developed the not-so-creatively coined Turing Test. This ‘human evaluator’ was designed to test a machine’s ability to demonstrate intelligent behaviour to the point that it was indistinguishable from that of a human.
A chatbot’s personality forms the basis for the “human” user experience. From start to finish, the way a bot says hello and the way it responds to our frustrations can be phrased in many different ways.
Millennials — yeah, those young, entitled and easily offended people you see on their phones 24/7 who use different acronyms every quarter (I think this one is GOAT; “Greatest Of All Time”) and still live with their parents.
There’s two strongly recurring themes in the myriad of conversations I’m having with people about artificial intelligence. The first is pervasive interest. I’ve worked in technology for almost 20 years, and nothing until now has generated both the level of interest – and debate.
The Financial Markets Authority (FMA) has made a change that fundamentally shifts the offering of financial advice in New Zealand enabling personalised robo-advice. This move allows for comprehensive disruption of the sector via new and innovative means of delivering advice.
With the elections behind us, and a newly installed government making pledges to spend taxpayer dollars, it’s time to discuss how AI will fundamentally change one of the biggest issues we face as a society right now.
Chatbots in the West are a relatively new phenomenon. Facebook launched their chatbot platform for Messenger in April 2016, shortly after Microsoft announced support for chatbots in Skype. Apple was even later to the party, announcing their Business Chat platform a few months ago. However, as is more often becoming the norm, the West was soundly beaten by the East in this innovation.
Trust. The key to a perfect relationship. In a world where knowledge is power, consumers are more and more concerned with their data. (Emphasis on the ‘their’).
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last year you’ll be well aware of artificial intelligence (AI) and its manifestation as Chatbots. Chatbots are a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the Internet.
I just watched the film “Multiplicity” from back in the 90s.
It’s a story about a guy who had too much on his plate. Menial activities like work and admin kept him away from his wife, his family, and other things he was passionate about.
So when he found a way to clone himself, he proceeded to do just that.
The IDC FutureScape’s digital transformation predictions for 2019 present a list of implications for New Zealand and global businesses.
I love tech. I live and breathe it; from my meditation device that tracks my heart-rate variability, to my heavy app consumption, to the amazing drift button in my car. I love the sweet sauce it brings to my life. To support it, I’ve invested in over 20 hi-tech businesses and grown countless others.
Conversational user experiences (UX) take a lot of work. There’s a reason many state “I’m like a child and just learning”, whilst endeavouring to deliver adult grade conversation within months or even weeks of birth.
Building and training your virtual employee (VE) chatbot is a vital step in adopting AI within your business. Just as important, is ensuring the adoption of it by your staff (for internal VEs), and awareness of it among your customers (for external VEs).
Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Bixby, and Google Assistant. While they all sound like members of a snazzy female pop group (keep up Google!), these are names we will all be speaking to every day. And more often than to our spouse according to Gartner!
That’s an obviously nonsensical leading statement. Why on earth would you build your own CRM in today’s everything-as-a-service world? You just wouldn’t, would you? Not now anyway — 20 and score years ago, you probably would have, but not any longer.
So, in the same vein, why would you build your own Conversational AI Platform?
Negotiations are a part of our everyday life.
From negotiating with your boss for a higher salary to negotiating with your two-year-old to finish her food, negotiations dictate the big and small decisions of our lives.
Negotiations require knowledge, lin
guistic expertise, tactic, and emotion. It is a part of our daily social interaction which makes it an inherently human/biological trait.
The future is bright for Conversational AI, despite its tentative progress: people overhype innovation when it first arrives but underestimate it once progressed over a few years.
Unless you’ve been actively ignoring it, or live in Pyongyang, I suspect you’ll have either read, heard about or seen the naysaying predictions about how AI is going to replace humans, and do us all out of a job. The truth is that none of us really know. The future is literally imaginary.
In an interview with Tim Warren, CEO and Co-Founder of Ambit, we explore the reasons integrating digital employees into your workforce will help you reduce costs, accelerate your teams’ productivity, and deliver unrivaled customer experience.
Chatbots, AI, and finance. There is something exciting about being at the very beginning of a new era in technology. I’ve been here before. I was one of the first staff members of an Internet company, Qbik, in 1996.
When you hear the term ‘chatbot’ you’re probably thinking about janky, unreliable experiences which clutter website interfaces.
We’ve all been frustrated by digital conversations had with someone that is clearly non-human.
After helping over 100 NZ organisations design chatbots – we’ve learnt a thing or two!
Here are my top tips for creating a great human-centred chatbot.
Chatbots provide a new kind of user interface to computer software. Rather than navigating with menus and buttons on a mobile or desktop device, a user has a conversation with a bot.
Tower Insurance officially announced their chatbot, Charlie, into the world. I have been an integral part of Charlie’s growing up process and I can’t wait to share the excitement!
Using machine learning hides what the software is really doing, but maybe that’s nothing new…
Artificial Intelligence (AI), and in particular machine learning, is getting no shortage of mainstream media coverage these days.
Context is everything. You don’t just walk up to someone and just start telling them about your new mobile phone deal or that Gartner predicts people will talk to bots more than their spouse by 2020.
Emerging technologies are shaping every single aspect of the way any modern business operates. So, it’s not a big surprise that chatbots are becoming an essential content marketing tool. Intelligent bots literally take content creation and distribution to the next level.