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  • Conference Whispers: Call & Contact Center Expo Las Vegas 2024

    Conference Whispers: Call & Contact Center Expo Las Vegas 2024

    Analyst: Dr. Doreen Galli

    Photography: Dr. Doreen Galli

    ABSTRACT

    After 2 days of filming, 31 videos and 34 shorts and over 30 factchecks, our coverage of this years’ Call & Contact Center Expo Las Vegas 2024 ends. CCCLV24 was held in Las Vegas from April 24 and 25. The event was held in the Las Vegas Convention Center South Lower Hall. The event featured 4 theaters with each featuring 6 talks each day for a total of 48 keynote sessions. Attendees witnessed endless examples of how generative AI and deep learning are revolutionizing the Call and Contact Center industry.

    Conference Vibe

    After 2 days of filming, 31 videos and ~30 shorts and over 30 factchecks, our coverage of this years’ Call & Contact Center Expo Las Vegas, CCCLV24, ends. With row after row of exhibits*, the event was made whole by the balanced combination of talks and exhibits. Even better, there was 15 minutes in between the talks so one could catch the exhibits. Furthermore, all theaters  schedules were aligned in the event you wanted to switch theaters as well.

    The short two-day event is definitely mighty and packs a punch with 4 keynote theatres each featuring 6 talks a day for a whopping 48 sessions. That said, there were also 2 keynotes who were to bashful to be taped which is a highly unusual occurrence. Nonetheless, we captured quite a lot of great content in this year’s CCCLV24 playlist. In fact we also spun out over 30 shorts which are at the tail end of the playlist – in case you only want to catch the super good parts!. We were also able to capture a video of the food available. Overall, it seems the Las Vegas Convention Center hits the mark as there were just as many bragging about the food and prices as there were complaining. The Global Voice of Customer Experience, Dennis Wakabayashi, was interviewing on site and even shared his wisdom in a keynote. Fascinating to see how leveraging global call center talent can truly impact the world in which we live.

    Getting Ready for Exciting New Technologies

    Sahni Sanjeev’s keynote by eGain appropriately drove home the requirements for corporate data programs to be mature before attempting to dive into deep learning tools and techniques. A second keynote by Uniphone offered up an Enterprise AI blueprint with some very solid advice. Specifically, your knowledge management system should be used so that the data determines your first actions. One must act based on the customer pain points not the cool technology. Of course if you didn’t get to organize it yet, Robot.AI shared their solution on exhibit. Robot.ai is simply feed all your corporate data then provides a gen AI service to answer questions about all of it.

    A keynote reminder was given that one cannot use newest and greatest AI tools without thought to protect your customers. This keynote was provided by Private AI’s co-founder Patricia Thaine. In her talk, she detailed the various scenarios and considerations one must take to not end up on the news for an embarrassing compromise. It was a true sign of industry maturity to see a product such as Private AI on exhibit this year as well.

    Speaking of protection, a vendor we are familiar with, SecureLogix shared their patented solution to stopping call pumping and TDoS attacks and more. Call pumping wastes an incredible amount of money. During my tenure as a telephony strategist, every public 800 number examined suffered from a call pumping compromise. At one point, 85% of all DDOS attacks had concurrent TDOS attacks- meaning your customers cannot find you on the internet or call you regarding the issue. One modern security concern involves deepfakes, to that end Veridas was on hand with their solution to identify and stop vocal deep fakes!

    Conference Whispers: NAB Show 2024 featured translation and transcription services leveraged in editing and broadcast in a keynote as well as in exhibits. Microsoft featured their solution based on Open AI. TRINT featured their text to speech solution adopted across the industry. You may also recall in Conference Whispers: Adobe Summit we covered Transperfect and their 200 languages. For the first time ever, we found the technology that the UN decided to use expanding a ten-minute demonstration into usage for the entire day’s session. Of course, if their presentations was anything like the one at CCCLV24, we understand. Worldwide Tech Connections does text to text, text to speech, speech to text or speech to speech. They build their own grammar and vocabulary models and parse the entire sentence before translating. Of course, if you only needed a bilingual medical back office, Access Salud was there to help.

    Technologies for Agents

    Awaken’s keynote points out that Agent Experience is your Brand’s experience to your customers. To that end, there were many technologies available to improve Agent experience. You may recall FLOWIT from Conference Whispers: CES 2024 that uses Generative AI over employee satisfaction. They were also featured in an Industry Whispers webinar. CCCLV24 had a similar technology by Centrical focused on improving employee experience.  They focus on creating best-in-class employee experience for frontline agents specifically. evaluagent was on exhibit sharing how their technology can execute deep analysis of the conversation and summarize freeing up their agents.

    For organizations seeking to add AI to their agents and leave it to the agent’s discretion when and how they use AI, then Smile.cx was there for you! If you want to capture all the folklore in your organization and make it available to your agents, ScreenSteps exhibited. If you want to avoid handing agents a 200 page searchable PDF files, Drop Cowboy may have an answer for you. In another exhibit, Reddy.IO has AI for your agents and stated a system setup takes 5 minutes. If your agents have heavy accents make calls frustrating for them to communicate, Tomato.ai who was on stage last year, was on exhibit this year. We also featured Tomato.ai in an Industry Whispers earlier this year.

    Big Profiles was on exhibit to provide intelligent customer profiles that predict certain customer propensities such as churn, purchases, cross sales, and collections. Structurely shared their solution to text or call customers including an AI created voice. Observe.AI can digest all conversations with customers to identify moments of interest. If you would appreciate accurate granular sentiment analysis over all those communications, Sestek and their conversational AI and analytics was on exhibit.

    Technology Customers will enjoy

    If you are an individual who’s number is the Do Not Call registry, you will appreciate DNC’s solution. DNC to assist call centers in respecting the list by scrubbing it for numbers that they should not contact. Meera.ai enables a company to stop annoying customers by maintaining contact cadence for the organization. TNS was one of the many vendors present that can add a telephony identifier, ANI, to wireless outbound calls to the ANI of the company represented. For readers who absolutely despise IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems, Talkr.ai shared their technology ready to make your corporate IVR system obsolete.

    If understanding your agent is critical, you will appreciate it if the agent calling has access to Tomato.ai, especially in the event they have a heavy accent. Likewise, if the company your calling is quite popular, you would appreciate if the company you are calling deployed Omilia – able to handle 6 million concurrent calls. If the company you do business with leverages Drop Cowboy, you may just get a custom voicemail. Drop Cowboy leverages deep learning capabilities to generate a voice to customize mass voicemails. Finally, for those of you that just hate filling out surveys after a speaking with a call center, Miarec has you covered. Miarec leveraged conversational intelligences to automatically score a call eliminating the requirement to survey the caller.

    Next Year’s Conference

    Call & Contact Center Expo comes to Las Vegas every year. The next CCCLV will occur April 16 and 17th, 2025, in Las Vegas, NV at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

    *When vendors’ names are shared as examples in this document, it is to provide a concrete example of what was on display at the conference, not an evaluation or recommendation. Evaluation and recommendation of these vendors are beyond the scope of this specific research document. Other examples products in the same category may have also been on display.

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    ©2019-2024 TBW Advisors LLC. All rights reserved. TBW, Conference Whispers, Industry Whispers, Vendor Whispers, Technical Business Whispers, Whisper Reports, Whisper Studies, Whisper Ranking and Fact-based Research and Advisory are trademarks or registered trademarks of TBW Advisors LLC. This publication may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without TBW’s prior written permission. It consists of the opinions of TBW’s research organization which should not be construed as statements of fact. While the information contained in this publication has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, TBW disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness, or adequacy of such information. TBW does not provide legal, or investment advice and its research should not be construed or used as such. Your access and use of this publication are governed by the TBW Usage Policy. TBW research is produced independently by its research organization without influence or input from a third party. For further information, see Fact-based research publications on our website for more details.

  • Industry Whispers: Generative AI in Production Lessons Learned

    This webinar will feature a panel of engineers that have deployed generative AI and their solution is in customers’ hands. You will be able to take away insights on the selection of technology, the process of realizing a solution, pitfalls, nightmares and what the panelists would do differently next time. 

    Research Code 2036.

    Dr. Doreen Galli has 6 degrees including a Waterloo CS Ph.D. in SIMD data storage and 8 patent held by IBM with 2 more pending at Microsoft. She has led significant and measurable changes at IBM, DPWN, Dell, ATT and most recently Microsoft where she was the platform architect for Azure and CTO in Azure’s MCIGET. She was trained as an analyst by Gartner where she was recognized as an expert in all things data from ingestion, quality, governance, integration, management and all forms and analytics including sensor data.

    An All-American Athlete Collegiate Runner, Dr. Galli enhanced her formal education with process improvement certifications of Black Belt, Lean Six Sigma, and Pull Thinking, along with Technology and Network Transformation Certifications from AT&T. She is a Top 25 Women on the Web recipient and a published author with over 200 articles. Her first book, “Distributed Operation Systems” was published by Prentice Hall in English and Chinese. Her second book, “Galli’s Keys to Success: Optimize your College Career” is available via online bookstores. Dr. Galli has been an invited speaker at such distinguished venues as Forbes Executive Summit, CIO Summit, CIO Academy, Grace Hopper, Network+ Interop Las Vegas, Gartner’s Catalyst as well as The Internet Security Conference.

    Ofer is the CEO of Tomato.ai, a speech GenAI startup that’s raised $10M to soften accents on calls in real-time. Previously he led a virtual agent startup within Google’s Area 120 incubator, for which he closed >$500M in Call Center AI deals. Prior to that Ofer led and sold a developer tools startup to Google, and an ad network startup to IAC. He holds a MS/BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, and an MBA from Cornell.

    Kevin is Cofounder and CEO of BirchAI, a leader in automating complex workflows in healthcare and other high-compliance call centers. BirchAI is a venture-backed spinout from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, one of the country’s leading AI research organizations.

    Previously in his career, Kevin worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA, GE Capital, McKinsey & Company’s global healthcare practice, and as an independent consultant across the healthcare sector. He also led business development in healthcare for the Austin-based AI startup, SparkCognition. Outside of work, Kevin cofounded Start Reading Now, a research-based non-profit that addresses Summer Setback and the Achievement Gap by funding thousands of young kids each year to buy their own personal library of 30 new books.

    Kevin was a German and Political Science major at the University of Nebraska, and completed his MBA at the University of Minnesota.

    Stephan Müller is Co-Founder and CTO of FLOWIT, a Swiss HR-Tech Startup. FLOWIT is a GenAI-powered people development platform that drives employee engagement and reduces employee churn.
    Prior to joining FLOWIT, Stephan Müller obtained a Master’s degree from ETH Zurich in Data Science, with a focus on theoretical Data Science and in particular Generative Networks, and worked in AI consulting, completing various project in the space of Recommender Systems and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

    Raika came to the United States when she was 15 years old and received her Bachelor of Science in Physics from California State University Northridge. She started as a junior system engineer and is currently the lead engineer at Livenation/Ticketmaster Information Security.

    Esha Joshi is the cofounder and Chief Product Officer of Yoodli, an AI powered speech coach. Her dream is to help women become more confident communicators so they get the opportunities they deserve. After struggling with public speaking for many years, Esha’s now a fomer Toastmaster speaking champion and Grace Hopper keynote speaker. She’s passionate about helping others become the best communicators they can be. Prior to Yoodli, Esha worked at Apple in engineering and product management capacities to help launch Apple TV+.

  • Conference Whispers: CES 2024

    Conference Whispers: CES 2024

    Conference Whispers: CES 2024 Playlist

    Analyst: Dr. Doreen Galli

    Photographer: Dr. Doreen Galli

    Published: January 17, 2024

    ABSTRACT

    CES 2024 allowed over 135,000 attendees to see more than 4,400 exhibitors. Attendees and exhibitors agree the word that best described the event was “engaging.” There were advances and capability announcements across all product categories and marketplaces. Anything you need to build your own products to those that can build them for you to products about to hit the market could be found. CES 2024 brought current technology advances of artificial intelligence, and virtual reality across the automotive sector, mobility, health, and manufacturing.

    The Conference

    • The first Consumer Electronic Show (CES) was held in New York City in 1967 with 17,500 attendees1. It is an industry conference focusing on all aspects of consumer technology. The conference features new product announcements in x product categories and y marketplaces.
    • CES 2024 was held in Las Vegas, Nevada and had just over 135,000 registered attendees, with 4,400 exhibiting companies.
    • Attendees at CES 2024 hold titles such as CEO, Founder, Investor, VP, Director, Chief Marketing Officer, VP of Engineering, VP of Product Development, data scientists, lead engineer, and buyer. CES attendees came from over B countries.

    Cautions

    • Care must be taken when creating a CES schedule. CES 2024 spanned multiple venues; buses and the Vegas Loop were provided with convenient routes between all venues. To this end, one’s schedule must allow for the transport or walk time between events. TBW Advisors’ analyst found that 30 minutes was sufficient between LVCC and Sands Convention Space; attendees should plan to allow one hour for transfer between other venues.
    • Just because a product has advanced AI and is designed for the home doesn’t mean that your privacy was fully taken into consideration. Adopters must verify data location and policies for any new products before they are brought into the home or office.

    Conference Vibe

    As an industry conference focused on everything related to consumer technology, CES is best described as a massive conference with highly engaged attendees. CES 20204 celebrates 100 years of innovation. The conference had some 135,000 registered attendees spanned venues, from Mandalay Bay, and Aria, on the Southside of the Strip to the Las Vegas Convention Center Halls West through North and Central. Buses ran frequently to transfer attendees between locations along with the Vegas Loop. One interesting aspect of CES is the juxtaposition of fun exhibits with deep talk tracks that feature impressive speakers discussing considerations taken while creating the various products being exhibited. Viewing TBW Advisors’ Conference Whispers: CES 2024 playlist in order may provide some context for the first-hand experience of attending CES. Alternatively, enjoy our CES Walkabouts Playlist.

    What product would you like to build?

    CES is a place for builders to go and find the components to build products themselves or find organizations to build them for them. CES 2024 was no different. One might start with MicroEJ* a favorite from 2020 CES (1), an containerized IoT device for software defined everything that is upwardly compatible with Android (2). Need sensors to support a function? Hamamatsu Photonics optical sensors were on display (3).  Want your product to be free of requiring a battery? Perovisky shared their indoor solar glass solution (4). Want to make sure you store the energy from the indoor solar glass? Nichicon was present with the LTO IoT battery (5). Perhaps you don’t want just any sensor in your solution but demand a smart sensor with AI models deployed on the edge with the sensor? To that end solutions presented include AI Zip smart sensors that can identify irregular behavior (6). Require data sets to train models in your space? Speeda Edge was onsite to get you quickly moving forward in your data space (7). Perhaps you require a human machine interface (HMI)? If the interaction is from facial movements, Naqi Logix had their Naqi enabled Neural Earbud on hand to control all digital devices and more important, their technology can be licensed to any earbud manufacturer(8). Meanwhile, PalmPlug was present for hand-based HMI interactions (9). Perhaps your IoT product requires a cellular connection. 1nce was one of the companies on hand available to provide a global cost-effective solution (10). Assembling the components but need it waterproof? 3m has any taping solution you might need to make your product come to life (11). If you require a Cloud vendor agnostic platform to manage Linux based secure online development, Strong Network was onsite to share their solution (12). Perhaps the entire process of finding and assembling all the components is just too much for you? Companies were on hand to help you put it all together from Telit Cinterion (13) to Siemens (14). Perhaps you are not even sure where to start or what product you would like to create that would have customer demand? To that end multiple industry analyst presentations were available from CTA itself (15) to the detailed presentation by Circana (16) that let you know exactly where consumers are spending today.

    Modern Green Smart Building

    CES is known as a conference for consumers but at the end of the day – it is just an amazing technology conference where you can find things you might not expect. For example, you were building new facilities. To that end you would like to understand modern technology you could include to make the building smart or green. CES has answers for you! At the entrance, you can keep outside dirt outside with Tectonic’s clean matt (17). No need to waste the beautiful energy from the sunlight on the windows with SQPV Glass by INQS that produces energy(18).  Perhaps the building is a data center without many external windows then the indoor solar solution could be incorporated from Perivskia (19). If you require weather information for your facilities, MyRadar will provide data rain or shine (20). Camera solutions for security or for indoor autonomous solutions could be found by E-Con Systems (21). Building in an area suffering from water shortages? Genesis Systems allows you to capture water from air (22) while HelioWater provide potable water from any type of water be it river water or salt water (23). Green smart exterior and parking lot lights leveraging solar energy are available from Green Tech (24). Have an emergency presentation and need a huge TV suddenly in a room without cabling? Wireless TVs from Display can be put up anywhere with a wall. It contains a battery that will stream for 6 hours straight or 30 day standby (25). Clean air for workers inside can be made available with a bioengineered indoor plant from Neoplant (26). If you have multiple smart buildings, Technis has a smart fleet building solution for you (27). Finally, if you are trying to grow, retrain, empower, or engage your employees, FLOWIT is a smart adaptive people development tool for your employees leveraging generative AI. It can even recommend training based on results of employee engagement surveys (28).

    *When vendors’ names are shared as examples in this document, it is to provide a concrete example of what was on display at the conference, not an evaluation or recommendation. Evaluation and recommendation of these vendors are beyond the scope of this specific research document. Other examples products in the same category may have also been on display.

    Mobility and Accessibility

    CES 2024 had a plethora of mobility and accessibility solutions on hand. As discussed in the session on building a sustainable secure superior future, technology and artificial intelligence advances have been monumental in mobility (29). This point was further emphasized in the discussion on AI powered strategies to transform the mobility experience (30) as well as in the talk, “Technology as a Force for Good” (31). Products on hand included the Mirairi speaker for the hard of hearing has a curved surface to push the voices towards the listener (32). Ives Chatbot for the deaf can understand and produce sign language for customer service solutions (33). For people with vision difficulties, OOrion intelligent locator assistant enables your phone to find anything in your environment or guide you to predetermined locations (34). Lighthouse Tech glasses enable one to identify when obstacles are present above waist height and is targeted at people with low or no vision (35).

    Healthcare

    Healthcare is always a large topic at CES every year and 2024 was no different. An overview presentation on the area, “Forces Reshaping Healthcare” was presented by Deloitte (36). Whether for home healthcare or telemedicine, The NuralogixTM Anura MagicMirrorTM scans your face and in 30 seconds calculates over 100 common metrics (37). Withings BeamO Home Checkup allows a remote practitioner to virtually listen to one’s heartbeat and lungs as well as follow vitals such as temperature, heart rate, ECG, and SpO2 (38). A twenty-minute scan leveraging a virtual reality headset and a program form Machine MD can inform your medical practitioners about any brain disorders (39). An actual virtual twin of the patient for cardiovascular purposes was shown by Dassault  Systemes (40). Smart devices of all types were also on display including smart ring by RingConn (41).

    Smart insoles for diabetes that are self-powered called SoleCooler were shared (42). If you deal with snoring, the smart pillow by 10Minds will sense the snoring and inflate an airbag to turn ones head on the pillow, causing the snoring to stop (43). Need better quality of sleep? MyWaves for better sleep will playback your best deep sleep brainwaves to help one fall asleep and increase quality by 25% (44). If you just want to see effortlessly, ViXion adjustable eyewear may be the exhibit that called out to you. To use, one simply adjusts so it is aligned with your eyes. Once adjusted, you can go from instantly reading 12-point font a quarter mile away on a wall across the convention center to a business card in front of your face. Yes instantly. While I never noticed eye strain, the lack of eye stress using the glasses was truly notable (45). Speaking of relieving stress, Sana Health VR solution can put your mind into a flow state (46).

    Finally, hospitals are a common vulnerability point. For doctors wanting to enable secure transcription at the edge, csky.ai does not allow the data to leave your desktop (47). If your hospital is the Target of ransomware attacks. Galeon EHR takes advantage of the immutable logs of blockchain for storing EHR records. This solution has enabled multiple hospitals to recover and continuously operate despite a ransomware attack (48).

    Smart Vehicles

    In 2024, CES is now the largest automotive show in the world. “Cracking the Smart Car – what truly defines them” discussed the need for cooperation for functionality and security (49). Today building a smart car can get an advanced start with available middleware such as that provided by Apex.ai (50). For OEMs wanting to set themselves apart, the ever-impressive smart mirrors from Gentex combining mirror and camera views were on display (51). To secure your smart car, Autocrypt provides the ability to secure the embedded systems (52). If you are looking to recreate, Pebble all electric trailer may be in your future (53) or perhaps you want to pack up your all electric dirt bike by GoWow to hit the trails in the BLM Parks (54). Today’s cars at CES are not confined to only driving on roads. The day we have been waiting for since we first watch the Jetsons futuristic cartoon has arrived as Xpeng Aeroht presented their flying car at CES (55). Finally, engineers for next generation cars were able to participate in the Indy Challenge. This challenge is a competitions between colleges to build a fully autonomous Indy Car (56).

    Consumer Tech

    Walmart was a significant keynote at CES (57) and even brought Microsoft’s Satya onstage (58). Shopping will never be the same. If Walmart has its way, shopping will it be easier, more convenient, automatics and quicker than ever before leveraging drone delivery (59). CES 2024 also brought you the magic of automated cooking from Tech Magic (60). While currently used in industrial kitchens, anyone involved in adulting can hope one is coming to a kitchen near them soon! One no longer has to drive to a brewery to get freshly brewed beer. CES featured the all-in-one Exobrew enabling all to brew at home (61). Likewise, one no longer must fuss with the step in between the washer and dryer or even adding detergent every load. GE Profile highlighted their all-in-one washer dryer that can hold an entire bottle of detergent (62).  Scrubbing the floors is easier with The Narwal Freo X Series robotic vacuum mops, the uniquely designed new models displayed include the Narwal Freo X Ultra and Narwal Freo X Plus models (63). Even mosquitoes don’t stand a chance in 2024 with the Reptilian smart mosquito repellent design in Africa (64). If one would like to interact with your grandchildren, Zoog has a solution for you (65).  Finally, discussions were held on the reality of the post hype metaverse (66).

    High School and College Participation

    CES 2024 featured the Indy autonomous challenge,a college competition to create the fastest autonomous Indy car. The cars raced at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. TBW Advisors was able to hear from the former Waterloo team captain (67).

    Charity

    This conference did not feature a specific charity event. CTA, the organizer of CES, has a related Foundation for its charitable contributions and actions – the CTA Foundation3.

    Next Year’s Conference

    CES 2025 conference will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada. The announced dates are January 7-10, 2025.

    Citations

    1. https://cdn.ces.tech/ces/media/pdfs/2020/ces2020_factsheet_9-23.pdf
    2. https://www.ces.tech/About-CES.aspx
    3. https://www.cta.tech/Who-We-Are/CTA-Foundation

    Corporate Headquarters

    2884 Grand Helios Way

    Henderson, NV 89052

    ©2019-20204 TBW Advisors LLC. All rights reserved. TBW, Conference Whispers, Technical Business Whispers, Whisper Reports, Whisper Studies, Whisper Rankings and Fact-based Research and Advisory are trademarks or registered trademarks of TBW Advisors LLC. This publication may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without TBW’s prior written permission. It consists of the opinions of TBW’s research organization which should not be construed as statements of fact. While the information contained in this publication has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, TBW disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. TBW does not provide legal or investment advice and its research should not be construed or used as such. Your access and use of this publication are governed by the TBW Usage Policy. TBW research is produced independently by its research organization without influence or input from a third party. For further information, see Fact-based research publications on our website for more details.