Tag: Artificial Intelligence

Singapore – Software-as-a-service (SaaS) company Zendesk has announced new artificial intelligence (AI) technology and conversational commerce features in order to improve its customer experience (CX) offering across its user base. The announcement follows the recent conclusion of Zendesk’s flagship conference ‘Relate’.

‘Zendesk AI’, the company’s new AI tech feature, is an intelligence layer that makes personalised, efficient and more empathetic customer experiences (CX) accessible for all companies. This new AI feature comes after Zendesk’s recent partnership with OpenAI.

Some of the capabilities of Zendesk AI include advanced bots that automatically solve issues and provide more personalised, industry-specific and accurate responses; improved agent productivity through AI-powered insights and suggestions to arm agents with more knowledge and context; and intelligent triage using capabilities such as intent and language detection and sentiment analysis to classify customer requests and allow teams to respond accordingly.

Available today, Zendesk AI will help companies instantly improve service experiences, save time, better understand their customers, and create seamless interactions. The solution continues to learn over time, is fast to deploy, easy to use, and immediately adds value without the need for large teams of developers or months of implementation time.

Cristina Fonseca, head of AI at Zendesk, said, “While running and scaling a successful CX team is complex, using AI should be simple. “With Zendesk AI, our proprietary models are specifically trained for CX and designed to immediately deliver actionable customer insights. These foundational features are key to improving customer service quality and agent efficiency, with potential to be even more powerful when combined with [large language models] LLMs.”

Meanwhile, Zendesk’s conversational commerce is made possible through deepening its partnership with Meta’s WhatsApp and Shopify, to further enhance businesses’ CX strategies and empower them to create a better shopping journey for their customers.

The conversational commerce feature provides direct support, marketing, and sales all from within a conversation, such as the capability for agents to leverage knowledge about customers’ ongoing shopping habits/status to personalise their service; identify new revenue opportunities by understanding any shopper’s habits and purchase history; and using AI to automate conversions and recommendations.

Adrian McDermott, chief technology officer at Zendesk, commented, “While we’ve seen huge shifts in the way people shop over the past few years, one thing has remained constant – people prefer to communicate via messaging. Now that digital is the new storefront, businesses will be able to use conversational commerce, built on our powerful messaging platform, to create a richer, more dynamic and interactive experience with their customers, which will ultimately lead to increased loyalty and revenue.”

Singapore – Adobe has today announced Adobe Firefly’s new integration with Bard, Google’s experimental conversational AI service, along with the expansion of the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), to continue the creative journey further in Adobe Express. 

In the coming months, Firefly will become the premier generative AI partner for Bard, powering and highlighting text-to-image capabilities. With the new Bard by Google integration, users at all skill levels will be able to describe their vision to Bard in their own words to create Firefly-generated images directly in Bard and then modify and use them to create designs via Express.

Adobe and Google are approaching this partnership through a creator-focused lens, with Adobe using CAI’s open-source Content Credentials technology to bring transparency to images generated through this integration. This partnership will deliver creator-focused generative AI to millions more people.

“The incredible response to our Adobe Firefly beta demonstrates the power and potential of generative AI to inspire more people to create and the strong demand for a creator-centric, commercially viable approach,” said Ely Greenfield, CTO, digital media at Adobe.

Greenfield added, “We’re empowering millions more people to use Firefly for creative inspiration and design and share standout content with Adobe Express through this integration with Bard by Google.”

Sissie Hsiao, vice president and GM of Assistant and Bard at Google, also remarked, “Generative AI has captured the world’s attention and changed how we think about collaboration and productivity. We’re thrilled to partner with Adobe Firefly, giving our users the power to bring their creative ideas to life, quickly and easily – directly in Bard.”

Firefly is the most differentiated generative AI service that generates commercially viable, professional quality content and is designed to be embedded directly into creators’ workflows both in Adobe’s own applications and now in Bard by Google. Enterprise businesses will be able to train Firefly with their own creative collateral in order to generate content in the company’s brand language. 

Moreover, the integration of Firefly across Adobe Experience Cloud applications will allow marketing organizations to use Firefly to accelerate their content supply chain production.

“At this critical moment in history, as generative AI becomes more powerful and prevalent than ever, people need a way to tell what’s behind the content they’re consuming. Content Credentials will enable creators to tell their stories authentically, while providing easy-to-use tools to verify how a piece of content was created and modified,” said Dana Rao, general counsel and chief trust officer at Adobe.

Recently, Adobe has also inked a partnership with marketing communications company Omnicom Group Inc. to reinvent the creation and delivery of creative content.

United Kingdom – Despite the rising popularity of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, it still generates an unrealistic view of everyday activities. In the specific topic of exercising, AI models generate images that depict unrealistic depictions of exercise benefits, often showing persons with extreme physiques.

In response to this, global sportswear brand ASICS has worked with creative agency GOLIN to launch an AI training programme to help teach AI that the real power of exercise is about transforming the mind.

The campaign tapped AI expert Omar Karim, to create the AI Training programme – a bank of images of real people enjoying exercise for the feeling, not aesthetics, combined with bespoke lines of code and AI prompts. Helping any AI system learn what exercise really looks like.

Moreover, ASICS is publicly calling on leading AI platforms to use the AI training programme to teach their AI tools what normal exercise looks and feels like – ending unrealistic and damaging depictions.

For Karim, while it is exciting that AI can be used in so many interesting ways, it is also extremely important that it’s taught to accurately represent the world and people around us. He added that as AI learns from years of content shared online, what we are looking at is today’s equivalent of airbrushing, only it’s being done automatically and without human judgement. 

“I’m really excited to be working with ASICS on this project and impressed by the action they’re taking. I hope this is just the start of brands looking to shape AI in a truly progressive way,” he said.

Alex Wood, executive creative director at Golin said, “AI’s warped understanding reflects what the online world teaches it – and us – about healthy exercise and bodies. Exercise elitism is everywhere, and it’s damaging. In response, we loved the idea of an exercise training program for something without a physical body – fuelled by more inclusive, happier and realistic exercise images. The results prove that the training program works – we now hope AI companies start using it to shape the future.”

Meanwhile, Gary Raucher, EVP for ASICS EMEA, commented, “At ASICS, we’ve always believed in the benefit of exercise, not just on the body, but also on the mind. And in today’s society, we know the uplifting power of exercise is needed more than ever. When we discovered that popular AI image-generating tools were creating unrealistic depictions of people who exercised, demotivating people to the point of exclusion from exercise, we were compelled to take action.”

The public has a key role to play too in this campaign as ASICS is inviting the public to share an image of themselves exercising on social with the hashtag #TrainingAI and tagging them on social media. After confirmation, each image will be added to the bank and used to train their AI. 

Singapore – Software-as-a-service (SaaS) company Zendesk has announced that it has integrated OpenAI across its software suite to expand AI-powered customer experiences for businesses.

At the moment, Zendesk has proprietary foundational models, which are customised and trained against decades of Zendesk customer experience (CX) data and industry-specific insights.

The combination of these models, Zendesk‘s industry-leading knowledge management solutions, and OpenAl enables businesses to save even more time by leveraging the power of generative Al to more effectively and efficiently resolve customer service cases. 

Moreover, the company’s software suite already includes many Al-powered CX features right out-of-the-box, such as conversational messaging, bots, knowledge management, advanced analytics, and self-service tools. The addition of OpenAl will provide businesses with a unique solution to enhance their customer experience and scale to levels that were previously unattainable. 

For Cristina Fonseca, head of Al at Zendesk, artificial intelligence can help business teams be more consistent, better understand customers, and derive insights from data.

“We provide the best Al tools that customers can start using in minutes. Our work with cutting-edge partners like OpenAl, helps us leverage the newest technology available to accelerate businesses’ ability to unlock the value of their customer interactions,” Fonseca said.

Mumbai, India – Software as a service (SaaS) company CleverTap has announced the integration of OpenAI with the CleverTap platform and the launch of its AI-generated content creator Scribe. This can generate campaign creatives, analyse emotions, and rewrite them keeping in mind a specific emotion that resonates with the brands’ users. 

The AI assistant can likewise interpret the emotion of messages and suggest the best alternative that users are more likely to engage with. Through Scribe, growth marketers can also auto-generate emotionally relevant copies and expedite content development by using just a few keywords. 

The technology also aims to enable brands and marketers to automatically determine the tone of their messages and leverage user engagement data based on emotion analysis to develop hyper-personalised content that is consistent with the brand and also resonates with the user. 

“Studies show that marketers only have 2 seconds to capture users’ attention in the digital realm. This gives marketers a very brief window to engage their users by tapping into the right emotions and AI enables brands to build these customized campaigns. These advancements in AI will open up the next frontier for marketers and bring back the ‘tech’ in MarTech,” said Jacob Joseph, vice president of data science at CleverTap.

He added, “We’re excited to launch Scribe – our very own OpenAI powered AI content creator to help our customers generate personalized, emotionally relevant messaging to stay connected with users and strengthen digital relationships.”

Scribe is currently available to CleverTap Enterprise Customers on an invite basis and will be rolled out to customers in April.

Previously, CleverTap has also launched CleverTap for Startups (C4S) that offers a full-stack retention platform to all smaller digital-native businesses that could assist in personalising and optimising all customer touchpoints.

Singapore – Lakehouse company Databricks has announced the release of Dolly 2.0, the world’s first open-source, instruction-following large language model (LLM) that is fine-tuned on a human-generated instruction dataset licensed for commercial use.

This follows the initial release of Dolly in March 2023, an LLM trained for less than USD$30 to exhibit ChatGPT-like human interactivity.

The 12B parameter language model is based on the EleutherAI Pythia model family and fine-tuned exclusively on a high-quality human-generated instruction-following dataset, which was crowdsourced among Databricks employees.

Moreover, Databricks is also open-sourcing the entirety of Dolly 2.0, including the training code, the dataset, and the model weights, all suitable for commercial use. This enables any organisation to create, own, and customise powerful LLMs that can talk to people without paying for API access or sharing data with third parties.

Meanwhile, its databricks-dolly-15k dataset contains 15,000 high-quality human-generated prompt or response pairs specifically designed for instruction tuning large language models. With this, anyone can use, modify, or extend this dataset for any purpose, including commercial applications.

“Dolly 2.0 is a game changer as it enables all organisations around the world to build their own bespoke models for their particular use cases to automate things and make processes much more productive in the field they’re in,” said Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks.

Ghodsi also added that with Dolly 2.0, any organisation can create, own, and customise a powerful LLM to create a competitive advantage for their business.

Last year, Databricks has also launched the first lakehouse platform for data-driven businesses in the media and entertainment industry, ‘The Lakehouse for Media & Entertainment’.

Seattle, Washington – In addition to its artificial intelligence and machine learning-powered tools, global travel platform Expedia has announced the beta launch of its new in-app travel planning experience powered by AI chatbot ChatGPT. 

With the new feature, Expedia members can now start an open-ended conversation in the Expedia app and get recommendations on places to go, where to stay, how to get around, and what to see and do based on the chat. 

The new trip planning experience also brings in intelligent shopping by automatically saving hotels discussed in the conversation to a “trip” in the app, helping members stay organised and making it easier for them to start choosing dates, checking availability, and adding on flights, cars or activities.

Prior to this, Expedia built a plugin for ChatGPT that lets travellers start a conversation directly on the ChatGPT site and select the Expedia plugin to bring a trip to life, but the conversational trip planning is now brought directly in the Expedia app.

“Every great trip can be made or lost while planning and shopping. As the leader in travel tech, Expedia continues to build out the core operating system for the industry, constantly enhancing capabilities and making trip planning faster, simpler and even more informative,” said Peter Kern, vice chairman and CEO of Expedia Group.

Kern also mentioned that by integrating ChatGPT into the Expedia app and combining it with its other AI-based shopping capabilities such as hotel comparison, price tracking for flights and trip collaboration tools, the platform can now offer travellers an even more intuitive way to build their ‘perfect trip’.

This collaboration with OpenAI is currently in the beta testing phase, allowing Expedia to evolve the experience based on its app users’ feedback and interaction.

The conversational trip planning beta experience is rolling out globally in the English language on the Expedia iOS app.

Australia – Promoting breaks for more than 65 years, popular chocolate brand KitKat has taken the opportunity to follow their own advice and let AI make their latest campaign so they could ‘have a break’.

Some appropriately generic briefs like ‘Write a KitKat ad the way Gen Z speaks’, ‘Write a KitKat ad about gamers’ and ‘Write a KitKat ad about the latest trends’ were used for the campaign. The generated scripts were used to prompt an image generator, resulting in some ‘almost ok’ images and AI voice.

João Braga, CCO at Wunderman Thompson, commented on the campaign, “AI is revolutionising our industry and beyond, but the reality is not every brand has something relevant (or fun) to say on that space.”

He added, “KitKat has breaks, and AI gives us more of those. So we thought we’d have a crack at it ourselves and poke a bit of fun at AI – while we can.”

Meanwhile, Nestlé’s Head of Marketing Confectionary, Melanie Chen, said, “We’re all for creating more opportunities to ‘have a break’, so when Wunderman Thompson asked us if we could let AI generate our next round of advertising content, we couldn’t pass it up.”

Chen, however, added that AI won’t replace jobs in the advertising industry any time soon without some real ‘watch-outs’.

The campaign is now live with 30’, 15’ and 6’ social and digital video, and 30’ audio and podcasts.

This follows KitKat’s interactive campaign on Instagram last year called the ‘Blink Break’, where consumers were encouraged to have a break and go head-to-head in an AI-powered staring contest.

Singapore – Cloud communications provider Vonage has announced an artificial intelligence (AI) acceleration suite to aid in the development of applications that deliver smarter solutions to drive business productivity and better experiences and engagements.

The new AI suite allows businesses and developers to deploy omnichannel customer journeys that use the power of AI and customer data to incorporate intelligence and automation into their customer experience applications.

For Vonage, the need for new and intelligent applications is accelerating as organisations look to enhance digital engagement for every stakeholder–which includes the customer, agent, and employee–to address each unique use case. They have also noted the rise of a new community of non-developers or so-called ‘citizen developers’, who are looking to create applications with real-time communications and seamless digital experiences.

Vonage’s suite solutions can be used together, flexibly in different combinations, or individually according to application needs. In addition, developers extend use cases and build specialised applications on top of other solutions with open access to Vonage communications APIs for voice, video, SMS and messaging.

Savinay Berry, EVP for product and engineering at Vonage, said that to meet evolving customer needs – and demand – for better ways to connect across channels of choice, enterprises today are looking for solutions that speed and simplify the development of intelligent, AI-powered customer experience applications.

“Vonage AI Acceleration Suite enables businesses to create better outcomes and enhance productivity with AI processing and programmable solutions that are essential for developers and non-developers alike to meet this growing demand for simpler and faster methods of application development to create a better overall customer journey,” Berry said.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Google Cloud has announced new artificial intelligence (AI) innovations dedicated to retailers to aid in their in-store shelf checking processes and enhance their e-commerce sites with natural online shopping experiences for consumers. It has also integrated its technologies with Accenture’s ai.RETAIL platform as part of its expanded strategic partnership.

The first on the list is Google Cloud’s new AI-powered shelf checking solution that can help retailers improve on-shelf product availability, provide better visibility into what their shelves actually look like, and help them understand where restocks are needed. 

Built on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Vision and powered by two machine learning (ML) models—a product recognizer and tag recognizer—the shelf checking AI enables retailers to identify products of all types, at scale, based solely on the visual and text features of a product, and then translate that data into actionable insights.

The company has also announced a new AI-powered browse feature in its Discovery AI solutions for retailers. This capability uses ML to optimise the order of products (i.e., which products the shopper sees first) on a retailer’s e-commerce site once shoppers choose a category, such as ‘women’s jackets’ or ‘kitchenware’.

Other Google Cloud announcements include more personalised search and browsing results with machine learning (ML), and the ‘Recommendations AI’ solution uses ML to help retailers bring product recommendations to their shoppers.

Meanwhile, Accenture’s ai.RETAIL is an integrated solution that helps retailers better utilise data and AI to optimise common systems and programs, such as customer acquisition, pricing and promotions, assortment, and supply chains. Retailers can now deploy the ai.RETAIL platform on Google Cloud, meaning it is extended to Google Cloud’s trusted infrastructure and is integrated with multiple Google Cloud products and capabilities.

For Megawaty Khie, country director for Indonesia and Malaysia at Google Cloud, the upheavals in the past few years have reshaped the retail landscape and retailers are now seeking new ways to be more efficient, more compelling to shoppers, and less exposed to future shocks.

“The leaders of tomorrow will be those who address today’s most pressing in-store and online challenges with the newest AI tools. Our work with Accenture will also help local retailers quickly adopt integrated solutions that amplify the true benefits of AI, so that they can holistically understand their business across functional boundaries and continuously optimise their offerings and operations to thrive in a complex retail environment,” Khie said.

Sridhar Subramanian, managing director of Accenture’s Google Business Group in Asia Pacific, commented that with shifting consumer buying habits, now more than ever, retailers need to invest in building a digital core – which includes a solid data foundation, ML, and AI. 

“With the best of Accenture’s integrated ai.RETAIL platform and Google Cloud technology, companies can now access products and capabilities to help improve consumer engagement and conversions, and make their supply chains more sustainable,” Subramanian said.

Google Cloud and Accenture are also collaborating on a broad, new initiative to address complex challenges facing retailers today, including applying intelligence from ai.RETAIL to help businesses optimise their customer, workforce, and storefront experiences, and utilising other technologies and offerings from both companies.