AI World 2017 a Cross-Section of AI Marketplace Exhibitors at the AI World Conference & Expo happening Dec. 11-13 in Boston represent a cross-section of the emerging AI marketplace, companies seeking growth and development by riding atop the AI wave. Here is an account of a selection of AI World exhibitors. Coveo Offers Cognitive Search […] 
AI World 2017 a Cross-Section of AI Marketplace
Exhibitors at the AI World Conference & Expo happening Dec. 11-13 in Boston represent a cross-section of the emerging AI marketplace, companies seeking growth and development by riding atop the AI wave. Here is an account of a selection of AI World exhibitors.
Coveo Offers Cognitive Search and Knowledge Discovery
Coveo combines unified search, analytics and machine learning to deliver relevant information and recommendations across every business interaction, including websites, ecommerce, contact centers and intranets. Coveo partners with the world’s largest enterprise technology players and has more than 1,500 activations in mid-to-large sized global organizations across multiple industries.
Coveo recently announced the Early Access of Coveo on Elasticsearch. This index-agnostic version of Coveo’s AI-powered search platform delivers the same out-of-the-box relevance and insight powered by best of breed machine learning and usage analytics, with the added ability of being deployed on top of the open source elasticsearch index, fully managed or self-hosted.
“One of the reasons many companies and integrators are drawn to using open source technology is the ability to build virtually any solution on top of publicly available assets.” said Gauthier Robe, Coveo VP of Products, in a press release. “With Coveo on Elasticsearch, Coveo has done much of the work to make that possible by decoupling our proprietary index from the critical search experience components, such as machine learning, usage analytics, customizable user interface, query engine and connectors. We are very excited to see what the Elasticsearch community is able to build utilizing these two powerful technologies”.
Coveo was named a leader in The Forrester Wave
: Cognitive Search and Knowledge Discovery Solutions, Q2 2017. The report evaluates 9 vendors on 23 criteria, grouped by Current Offering, Strategy and Market Presence. Coveo received the top score in the strategy category.
According to the Forrester Wave Report: “Coveo focuses on the key to relevancy — context. Search is successful when the results are relevant to the person querying for them. Coveo’s R&D focuses on using advanced analytics and machine learning to automatically learn the behaviors of individual users and return the results most relevant to them.”
Learn more at Coveo.
DataRobot Offers Enterprise Machine Learning Platform
DataRobot offers an enterprise machine learning platform that empowers users to make better predictions faster. Incorporating a library of hundreds of open source machine learning algorithms, the DataRobot platform automates, trains and evaluates predictive models in parallel, delivering more accurate predictions at scale.
DataRobot recently announced that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) ML Competency status. The designation recognizes DataRobot for providing business analysts, data scientists and machine learning practitioners with an automated, cutting-edge solution that enables predictive capabilities within customer applications.
Achieving the AWS ML Competency distinguishes DataRobot as an AWS Partner Network (APN) member that streamlines machine learning and data science workflows, and is an indication that the company has demonstrated extensive expertise in AI and ML on AWS. Thousands of DataRobot users run on AWS, having built more than 300 million machine learning models.
“Since day one, we have demonstrated a fierce commitment to making the AI-driven enterprise a reality,” said Jeremy Achin, CEO of DataRobot. “Achieving AWS ML Competency status recognizes our track record of excellence in automated machine learning, as well as our dedication to our users, many of whom rely on AWS to power their data-driven initiatives.”
The DataRobot automated machine learning platform puts the power of ML into the hands of any business user. DataRobot automates the data science workflow, enabling users to build and deploy highly accurate predictive models in a fraction of the time of traditional methods. Developers building applications on AWS can leverage DataRobot’s APIs to power the machine learning in these applications.
Learn more at DataRobot.
Expert System Inc. On the Power of Social Signals
Expert System Inc. is a leading provider of cognitive computing and text analytics software based on the proprietary, patented, multilingual semantic technology of Cogito. Using Expert System’s products, enterprise companies and government agencies can go beyond traditional keyword approaches for making sense of their structured and unstructured data. Our technology has been deployed as solutions for a range of business requirements such as semantic search, open source intelligence, multilingual text analytics, natural language processing and the development and management of taxonomies and ontologies.
Prior to the Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping days, Expert Systems analyzed a sample of 120,000 tweets in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian, posted online from Oct. 20 to Nov. 20, 2017. The analysis showed 75% of the tweets were focused on Black Friday deals, while 25% were focused on Cyber Monday offers. Amazon is the most frequently-mentioned retailer.
As a product category, high-tech products dominated the tweets, and Apple is the most-cited brand. In the battle between iPhone and Galaxy, iPhone wins, with 69% of English tweets on the smartphone subject were focused on iPhone, and 31% on Galaxy.
The origin of Expert System’s cognitive technology “Cogito” (Latin ‘I think’) dates back to the nineties, a time when the convergence of linguistics and technology was something only being talked about in research institutions or in academia. After licensing its early technology to Microsoft, Expert System was able to fully extend the vision to developing software that could understand the meaning and context of language. The effort produced one of the first semantic analysis platforms and led to Expert System’s patented Cogito technology.
Cogito’s technology has been deployed within hundreds of organizations of differing industries from banking to publishing to healthcare to insurance. Thousands of interactions have been analyzed, generating millions of data poitns to enhance the effectiveness of Cogito’s behavioral models.
Learn more at Expert System.
UiPath Offers Robotic Process Automation for Managing the Robotic Workforce
UiPath is a leading provider of Robotic Process Automation technology enabling global enterprises to design, deploy and manage a full-fledged robotic workforce. This workforce mimics employees in administering rules-based tasks and frees them from the daily routine of rote work. The UiPath RPA computing platform is dedicated to automating business processes. It provides process modelling, change management, deployment management, access control, remote execution and scheduling. It also provides execution monitoring, auditing and analytics in full compliance with enterprise security and governance best practices.
In recent news, UIPath announced partnerships with five companies who will provide UiPath-accredited training for clients and partners globally. Companies EY Romania, Machina Automation, Roboyo, SMFL Capital Japan and Symphony Ventures will have their expert trainers undergo advanced training and testing in the UiPath RPA platform. These experts will teach the RPA Developer Advanced Training course, enabling graduates to implement the UiPath’s RPA platform within their own or their clients’ organizations. Machina Automation will also offer the RPA Business Analyst training.
From January 2018 onwards, the five partners are organizing onsite training, starting with the RPA Developer Advanced Course and the RPA Business Analyst Course, and expanding the curriculum over the coming months. EY, Roboyo, and Symphony will be conducting training on a global scale, while Machina Automation will be active in North America, and SMFL Capital in Japan.
UiPath also recently announced a strategic partnership with Enate, the provider of Robotic Service Orchestration (RSO). The partnership will look to drive accelerated automation success for the companies’ mutual partners at any stage of their digital journey.
Enate comes with custom-build Activity Libraries for UiPath Studio, allowing for the seamless integration of UiPath robots into the orchestration platform. This is the cornerstone of the world’s first environment that allows digital and human teams to work together seamlessly, and the partnership is already bringing business benefit to clients such as insurance giant Generali.
Learn more at UiPath.
VoiceBase Provides APIs for Speech Recognition
VoiceBase provides APIs for speech recognition, speech analytics and predictive analytics to surface the insights every business needs. Enterprises utilize VoiceBase’s deep learning neural network technology to automatically transcribe audio and video, score contact center calls, and predict customer behavior. Privately-held, VoiceBase is based in San Francisco.
A member of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network, VoiceBase recently announced an integration for Amazon Connect customers. The integration is designed to ingest call recordings from Amazon Connect, transcribe and analyze the content and publish the results on AWS. This integration makes it easy for Amazon Connect users to surface valuable insights from calls and make better decisions using data from their contact center. VoiceBase was one of the initial APN Partners to support Amazon Connect to deliver advanced speech analytics to a growing cloud contact center customer base.
The VoiceBase API features include machine transcription and keyword and phrase spotting, PCI redaction, instant custom vocabulary and predictive insights. Predictive Insights was a product born from years of data science research and the idea of combining artificial intelligence and spoken information to detect complex events and future customer behavior in sales and service calls. With this integration, these services power many sought-after enterprise use cases such as agent quality monitoring, auto call scoring, compliance, and sales optimization.
“We are excited to expand our collaboration with AWS and their customers to offer customized speech analytics and predictive analytics services,” said Walter Bachtiger, Founder and CEO of VoiceBase, in a press release. “AWS provides the ideal framework for VoiceBase to layer on its speech analytics API and unlock valuable insights for the enterprise.”
VoiceBase’s customers include Amazon Web Services, Twilio, Nasdaq, HireVue and Veritone.
Learn more at VoiceBase.
Pegasystems Targets Intelligent Business Process Management
Pegasystems Inc., a leader in software for customer engagement and operational excellence, offers its adaptive, cloud-architected software –built on its unified Pega® Platform – supporting rapid deployment and ability to extend and change applications to meet strategic business needs. Over its 30-year history, Pega has delivered award-winning capabilities in CRM and BPM, powered by advanced artificial intelligence and robotic automation, to help the world’s leading brands achieve breakthrough business results.
Pegasystems recently announced the availability of Pega® Deployment Manager, a no-code, model-driven capability that enables businesses to accelerate the deployment of new applications and software updates. Businesses are turning to DevOps (software development and operations) methodologies to catch up to more nimble competitors and transform into real-time application deployment machines.
But most development organizations quickly become overwhelmed with the numerous tools, specialized skills, and cultural shifts needed to be DevOps-proficient. As a result, they remain stuck in the early stages of DevOps maturity or don’t know how or where to start. Meanwhile, more agile enterprises continuously release new software and features to meet the latest customer demands, leaving the competition behind.
Pega Deployment Manager aims to guide teams through all stages of agile deployment – from unit testing and packaging, to staging and testing – into a consolidated visual roadmap driven by proven best practices. Without any coding, DevOps-enabled teams can progress new apps and capabilities to the next stage in the pipeline with a single click, making it simple and easy to bring software into production.
In other recent news, Pegasystems was named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant to Intelligent Business Process Management Suites. Pega has been recognized as a Leader in this report every year since its inception in 2003.
In the report, Gartner evaluated 19 intelligent business process management suite (iBPMS) vendors on their ability to execute and completeness of vision. Gartner assessed Pega® Platform, which combines case management, BPM, robotic automation, AI and decisioning, mobile, and omni-channel UX on a unified platform.
Learn more at Pegasystems.
CognitiveScale Targeting Financial Services; USAA Invests, Becomes a Customer
CognitiveScale builds industry-specific augmented intelligence solutions for financial services, healthcare, and digital commerce markets that emulate and extend human cognitive functions by pairing people and machines. Built on its CORTEX augmented intelligence platform, the company’s industry-specific solutions help large enterprises drive change by increasing user engagement, improving decision-making, and delivering self-learning and self-assuring business processes.
In recent news, CognitiveScale announced that a USAA affiliate has made a strategic investment in the company and became a customer. USAA will implement the CognitiveScale Financial Services augmented intelligence products for delivering contextual customer engagement and improving advisor productivity. By using CognitiveScale, USAA is positioning to provide its more than 12 million members predictive, data-driven banking and insurance services while learning continuously from user interactions and data.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a major disruptive force in banks, insurance companies and financial services organizations. According to IDC, global cognitive systems spending market will grow to $47 billion by the end of 2020 with the Banking Industry accounting for 19 percent of that projected market spend.
“USAA has a long history of using emerging technologies to develop innovative ways to serve our members,” said Nathan McKinley, VP and head of corporate development for USAA. “Our work with CognitiveScale allows us to support such innovation through our investment while also leveraging the AI products they have today to find ways to better serve our members.”
Elsewhere, CognitiveScale recently announced the addition of Dr. Joydeep Ghosh as the company’s first Chief Scientific Officer. An internationally recognized authority on machine learning, data-web mining and related artificial intelligence (AI) approaches, Dr. Ghosh joins the team with more than 30 years of experience applying these technologies to complex real-world problems.
As CognitiveScale’s Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Ghosh will focus on aligning and tightly integrating the company’s Cognitive Cloud software with industry-specific data models and the latest algorithmic sciences efforts; recruiting the best and the brightest minds in AI while supporting those already at CognitiveScale; and educating the market about the power and value of augmented intelligence and enterprise-grade AI.
Learn more at CognitiveScale.com.
Zylotech Offers Customer Analytics Platform
Zylotech is an MIT spin-off offering the AI Customer Insights Platform which combines customer data management with a deep-learning driven decisioning engine. Zylotech uncovers probabilistic customer behavior patterns from all data sources to enable real time customer marketing with a high success rate.
Zylotech’s Customer Analytics Platform uses automated machine learning to identify, unify, cleanse, and enrich customer data to power AI-driven, real-time customer insights for marketing teams to execute upon.
Zylotech offers an ebook, “Retailers Guide to Customer Retention & Monetization”, covering strategies retailers are using to tame their data and move from big data to big insights.
Learn more at Zylotech.com.
— Written and compiled by John P. Desmond