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Thursday, March 8, 2018


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Verint’s John Goodson, SVP & GM, Products, Customer Engagement Solutions, hosted an invitation-only CIO/Executive Roundtable and Dinner on the topic of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) on February 21 in Atlanta’s Perimeter area.

Executives from more than two dozen leading organizations attended representing healthcare, transportation, travel and hospitality, financial services, building products, manufacturing and retail sectors.

Here are some of the takeaways from the roundtable executive engagement and discussions:

Automation and AI Planning Is In Process. 60% of all attendees did not yet have a defined automation and AI strategy or plan. How do early adopters vs. laggards compare across industry sectors? A recent McKinsey and Company article indicated a “yawning divide between leaders and laggards in the application of AI, both across and within sectors.” Check out this February 6 blog post announcing the Automation and AI Roundtable for a link to that article. 

Business and Information Technology Partnerships. Organizations that did have initiatives in progress had joint partnerships between business and IT groups. Forward-looking organizations that are focused on modernizing customer engagement operations are looking at automation and AI very closely.

Automation Drives Customer Engagement Optimization and Broader Business Optimization. Around half of the automation and AI initiatives executives had underway were customer engagement or customer service focused—and half were focused on how to improve broader business operations (e.g., how to provide energy more efficiently, how to service elevators more effectively). AI is a popular buzzword today, and there are a lot of applications for it. We frequently read about organizations that are testing and piloting autonomous, self-driving cars—we’ll continue to see automation in customer engagement, factory settings, healthcare, intelligent appliances and many other areas.

Got Funding? There was a long discussion on how projects get funded. One executive said, “Our business lead and I went to the CEO and CFO and showed that some of our customer experience transactions would go from an average cost of $40 per transaction to $5 per transaction—and with an accompanying increase in revenue. And we have more than 30,000 of those transactions per month. The project was funded before we left the room.” Another executive had a similar example where transactions at an average cost of $75 each were reduced to $12 per transaction through automation.

How Do We Get Started? Organizations today recognize that the effective adoption of automation can be game-changing for the enterprise and drive increased loyalty, satisfaction, revenue and efficiency. Consensus in the room was to “always start with a business problem. Don’t try and make automation projects an IT initiative.”  Customer engagement automation will continue to gain traction in the customer engagement industry, fueled by the need for organizations to continually innovate their offerings, accelerate time to market, and maintain a competitive advantage.

Verint continues to infuse automation throughout its customer engagement portfolio by leveraging the power of the most advanced artificial intelligence and analytics technologies. Check out this recent news for some of the latest in Verint automation innovation: Verint Accelerates Workforce Engagement for Back-Office Operations with New Automation Capabilities.

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