Ai: Irl

We’ve all read about how Wall Street firms have invested billions in AI and machine learning. What about financial AI for people on Main Street? To find out, I spoke with Bharath Kadaba, Chief Innovation Officer at Intuit. Intuit’s brands include personal finance products like Quicken and Mint, business accounting software like Quickbooks, and TurboTax the #1 best-selling tax preparation software to file taxes online. Of course, the company is on the cutting edge of AI. In the podcast you’ll learn: Where AI excels. The future of taxes. Your personal virtual CFO. The dawn of the conversational, empathic AI. AI’s greatest trick: Making itself disappear.

You may not think of your Human Resources department as a center of innovation but HR is using tools like AI to focus on how to develop people, acquire new talent, and other ways to better engage with employees. To find some of the latest cutting edge insights in HR, I recently spoke with Jo Deal, the chief human resource officer at LogMeIn, a computer software company in Boston.

What if there was a way to make your retirement planning as easy as ordering an Uber? Sunil Gangwani, co-founder and CEO of Plootus, has created this magical, machine learning app. Plootus is an AI app that offers millennials (and others) simple, automatic retirement planning. The free app is available for download on both IOS and Android. Once you link your various accounts to it, this app looks at where you are in life, your location, your employer’s retirement options, even your daily spending habits and devises a simple, automatic retirement plan.   

“We launched version 1 on Alexa. If a customer’s tracking started with ‘1z’ They could never track their package. Alexa would look up baby onesies.” Creating chatbots is a frontier. It’s new and there is a lot to consider. Fortunately, my guest Qing Cao, in addition to being a certified Lean Six Sigma black belt, is the leader of the customer-facing, emerging technology product development team at UPS. On this episode of AI:IRL she joins me to unpack the different ways you can build a bot to fit your situation and defining your purpose and asking guiding questions for decision-making. We also discuss how language, platforms, and regions affect scale and team size, the importance of listening to the customer, the future of bot training with machine learning, and having a test-and-see mentality.

At this point every brand knows the power of social for brand awareness. But often the incoming data from customers and the potential it gives companies is either not known or unharnessed. Many companies try to use the same team responsible for the outgoing messaging to handle the incoming. But the incoming is so data heavy. AI needs to be specialized at handling that flood of information so it can maximize the talents of the human support team. Luckily there’s Tim Lopez. He’s the TSIA Director of support services and social research. His company provides best practices and industry standards to brands looking to maximize their support teams with AI. Tim’s expertise lies in understanding the way that brands can not only use AI for building their brand awareness, but for creating an enhanced support team in a data heavy social media environment. This post is based on a podcast with Tim Lopez from TSIA. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to AI: IRL. If you don’t use iTunes, you can

Incremental results get disrupted by smaller, more agile, often invisible companies. How do large businesses transform to stay ahead of the disruption? We hear a lot about digital transformation. But what does that mean? And how do you companies make changes that are transformative and not simply additive? Sid Raisoni, being the Head of Analytics at Nestle Waters, is an expert on the subject of big company digital transformation In this episode of AI: IRL, he unpacked: what transformation truly is, an analytics-focused 5 step transformation strategy, and how employees can drive transformational change.

Chatbots are everywhere these days. It seems like you can’t log into any sort of SaaS website without seeing that little popup window in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen saying something to the effect of: “How can I help?” But are those chatbots actually helpful? Are they actually doing what the customers are wanting? And is there a limit to what a bot can help the customer accomplish vs what an actual human can do?

Directors and VPs come to him all the time with a unique problem: CIOs and CTOs handed them a budget for new technology. “Spend this money on AI and machine learning.” The budget isn’t the issue. The problem is knowledge. Between all the hype and press releases, where does a business start putting their AI and machine learning dollars to leverage actual growth? John Ragsdale provides a few phenomenal launching points. He works at TSIA as Distinguished Researcher and VP of Research and Service Technology. Formerly, he was a Research Director at Forrester Research and Research Director for Giga Information Group. He knows his stuff. He came on the AI: In Real Life podcast to discuss a new report that TSIA recently released on AI in business.

Is AI the savior or the death knell for CX? Micah Solomon, a customer service consultant, keynote speaker, and author, came on the AI:IRL podcast to discuss building great customer experiences using AI.

Ultimately a product is only as good as its usability. The UX/UI of artificial intelligence is vitally important. With so many directions to explore, what are the areas that actually lead to real end-user improvement? On this episode of AI: In Real Life we invited Kat Dykes to share how her team at Asurion is developing chatbots to create a seamless claims process conversation. Kat’s a Senior UX Designer with over a decade UX experience, contracting for Levi’s, Charles Schwab, Blue Bottle, EnChroma, and several others. On this episode, she gave us an inside peek into the world of UX design. Along the way, she also cracked upon AVA — Asurion Virtual Assistant.

AI: In-Real-Life is a podcast dedicated to democratizing artificial intelligence for today’s fastest growing companies. Whether you’re looking to learn from actual implementers and industry experts using the latest AI software to enhance every potential customer’s experience, or simply hear about making AI more accessible to a broader market, this is the podcast for you. Each episode features topics like: customer engagement, employee support, chatbots, natural language processing, data intelligence software, knowledge base, intuitive platforms, omni-channel engagement, live chat software, customer experience, customer service, customer interactions, deep learning, and more.

People are starting to realize how big a problem poor AI and chatbot design is. The end results companies design is often a terrible user experience. There’s a lack of understanding natural language design. Everyone stands to gain from chatbots that can control conversations and solve problems all while keeping the user engaged and feeling great about the interaction. This is where Hans van Dam’s expertise comes in. Hans is the managing director of Robocopy and founder of The Conversational Academy. His company is changing the way AI interacts with customers by putting first thing first: natural language design. And The Conversational Academy exists to train designers in this skill. Whether you’re a UX designer, a copywriter, or a product owner, this episode’s for you. This post is based on a podcast with Hans van Dam from Robocopy. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to AI: In Real Life. If you don’t use iTunes, you can find all the episodes here.