By Jeremiah Owyang and Jessica Groopman, Kaleido Insights Analysts.
A new category of software companies must emerge, these companies enable a business to manage multiple virtual assistant experiences from one single platform.
Business needs: marketing, customer care, and other departments are struggling to manage various virtual assistant and AI platforms ranging from Alexa, Cortana, Facebook messenger, and beyond. The APIs will frequently change, often without notice, multiple scripts will have to be integrated and managed per each platform.
These vendors have the following features:
- Enable a business buyer to manage a single set of chat scripts from a single platform,
- Manage changing APIs from various Virtual Assistant companies, reducing customization by the business buyer
- Enterprise-class data security and compliance
- Provide aggregated analytics and dashboard reports cross-platforms
- Foster data integration and common data standards
- We’ll obtain more business requirements from the large companies we speak with on a regular basis.
If this patterns sounds familiar, we saw this same exact market movement in the social business industry, and a rise of Social Media Management Systems emerged (I covered this market at great length) to manage dozens of social networks with ever varied and changing platforms.
Management tool will need to manage AI agents across multiple functions, channels, platform providers:
- Voice services (Alexa, Cortana, Siri, Google Assistant)
- Branded service agents (IPsoft’s Amelia; Autodesk’s AVA)
- Massaging Chatbots (via Facebook, WhatsApp, website)Platform agents (Adobe’s Sensei; SFDC’s Einstein)
- Custom back-office agents (workflow, project management, productivity, recruiting, sales, ecommerce, advertising, inventory search etc.)
