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Custom built for enterprises from university research, CogniCor has been a pioneer in conversational AI helping enterprises augment user experience and drive business results.
We recently interviewed CogniCor CEO & Co-founder, Dr. Sindhu Joseph who talks about CogniCor’s much awaited product, CIRA and the importance of knowledge management in enterprises. With a PhD in AI and inventor of 6 US patents in AI, her PhD thesis inspired her to start CogniCor and engineer cognitive intelligence into the core of business – customer interactions and engagements.
Q: What does CogniCor Technologies do?
A: CogniCor is one of the fastest growing providers of interactive assistants for enterprises. These interactive assistants act as a cognitive interface for businesses that can read and understand existing enterprise knowledge and, architect impactful conversations that convert to tangible results. Named as IDC innovator in conversational AI platforms 2018, CogniCor’s patent-pending technology has been deployed across the globe and helped enterprises realise an ROI of over $100 million.
Q: You launched CIRA last year. Can you tell us something more?
A: Yes, CIRA is the platform through which any company can create their own interactive assistant. Through our deployment experience, we understood that enterprises have knowledge hidden in hordes of documents which is under-utilized. CogniCor’s CIRA offers enterprises the ability to tap into the unexplored potential of the enterprise knowledge , thereby reducing the need for specialized AI resources in the process of building, deploying and maintaining conversational interfaces.
CIRA’s intuitive UI helps anyone in the enterprise irrespective of background, create intelligent virtual assistants that are able to use the real-world understanding of concepts and generate a response on the fly. CIRA also offers the ability to manage conversational knowledge in the interactive assistant as opposed to content management platforms.
Recommended: Q: What is conversational knowledge management and why is there a need for it?
A: Conversational knowledge is knowledge used to drive conversational interfaces and is enriched by feedback from real time interactions with customers. According to Forrester , more than half of global information workers are interrupted from their work a few times or more per month to look for information, insights, and answers. The easiest way for any user to find information is via a virtual assistant that understands your question and provides instant response.
But structuring this knowledge is key for the AI to understand the context and yield a response relevant to the user. Conversational Knowledge Management is the first step for an enterprise to transform to a cognitive enterprise. Since conversational AI is fast becoming a platform of choice in all facets of our lives, enterprise users should be able to create and update information in the interactive assistant itself.
Q: How will conversational AI take shape in 2019?
A: Over the past year, enterprises have embarked on a more in-depth exploration of conversational AI moving beyond front-office and deploying it in many internal and external interfaces. They have been reaping benefits of conversational AI for customer-facing and agent/employee-facing use-cases. Recently, OCBC Bank in Singapore facilitated $33m in home loan leads through their chatbot within six months of launch.
We believe 2019 will be the year where enterprises will move beyond simple chatbots and transition into the core of enterprise workflows and processes. In addition, AI will be put to use to drive insightful decision making and enrich user experience. As enterprises move along their AI journey, they will look to embed processes and workflows for a better user experience providing users the ability to transact without leaving the chat window.
Voice assistants such as Google home and Alexa are becoming commonplace and more customers will start demanding the same voice interface from enterprises’ customer service as well.
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Q: What are your plans moving forward?
A: Our mission is to combine our technology prowess with our clients’ domain expertise to transform enterprises into cognitive enterprises. Each enterprise is at a different stage in their AI journey and we are looking forward to helping banking, insurance, IT helpdesk and HR firms add high end AI capabilities as they move ahead.
As the adoption of CogniCor’s CIRA increases, we are onboarding more channel partners
and building the CIRA community of developers and partners to collectively future proof
enterprises .
