The importance of AI-CI in modernizing your apps

PCQuest, in association with Streebo and IBM, held a live webinar on the theme of “App Modernization with Cloud Pak for Apps & AI” with the aim of increasing customer reach by as much as 70%. The live webinar was well-attended and all the attendees got detailed information on how Artificial Intelligence could help during this current Covid-19 crisis.

Sunil Rajguru, Editor, PCQuest, said that the current crisis was an opportunity for digital acceleration. During times of crisis, technology always comes to the rescue and a lot of advancement is made. This is the time to upgrade organizations and personal skills to ride through the crisis and prosper.

Streebo is an IBM Business Partner that builds products, tools and pre-built solutions for Digital Transformation. Co-founder and Managing Partner Usman Memon gave a presentation titled “Modernize your Apps with AI & get them Voice & Chat Activated!” where he talked about the next-gen apps with the IBM-powered Conversational Interface (CI). Quoting sources, Memon pointed out that there was a 20% increase in online buying after the onset of Covid-19, Facebook and WhatsApp saw a 40% surge in their users while there was a spike in consumers’ digital interaction rate by 30% and their affinity of availing digital services.

A Conversational Interface (CI) is necessary with the advent of AI and NLP and the spread of messaging platforms and voice clients. A whole shift is happening on how end users are expecting to interact with systems. The benefits of CI include increased revenue & customer reach, cost savings, increased productivity, 24X7 availability and increased customer satisfaction. CI has been successful in organizations like ICICI, RedBus and IRCTC.

During the webinar, a demonstration was also given on how a CI actually works in the environment of a bank where one can make a query in English or a local language or even Hinglish, login, do funds transfer (with the safe and secure OTP), all in one sitting. The Streebo-IBM app can actually make you do all that on WhatsApp or via SMS. Taking it even further, you can go with voice interaction too. Another demonstration was shown on a furniture store, where it is quite easy to make a query, get the answer and even buy a product in the very same process via Amazon Alexa. All this is done keeping scalability and security in mind.

Said Memon, “Our experience has been that it drives productivity, it drives more adoption within your system. It becomes much easier for people to look for information.” He added, “We have two models. We have a capex model where you can make investment upfront or we also have an opex model. You can start with a pilot or an MVP. Since the market is tight, we have also come out with a creative opex model, which is a subscription model. You can sign up for a free trial and go to a month to month subscription.”

You can catch the complete webinar here...

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