| | July 20198Overview:In recent months, few readers have been able to avoid interaction with conversational platforms. At home, we have watched Alexa giving an ap-plause in TV adverts,we have used Siri to find a playlist or, perhaps re-ceived the latest Smart Speaker as a birthday gift. The workspace has been no differ-ent. The excitement is palpable ­ for the first time since computers became personal, we are adopting a newer and more natural way of interacting with machines, using speech instead of keyboards. In the coming months, conversational platforms will be all likelihood, be at the centre of the transition in our business landscape.What is happening?In the last few years, advances in NLP and AI along with availability of excellent software libraries such as NLTK and spaCy have enabled com-pelling use cases for conversational platforms. The more promising use cases relate to enhancing productiv-ity and experience for employees and customers. For example, employees can now log their leave using chat-bots, customers can interact with virtual assistants to resolve issues quickly or the sales force can review their dashboard with just voice com-mands. The focus of these efforts has generally been a limited one - to automate processes or reduce costs, although to be fair, many of these are still at an early stage in their service lifecycle.There is considerable expectation that these efforts will scale from the current focus on automation and move towards intelligence, thus be-coming truly transformational. For example, in global sales teams, learn-ings from past deals won or lost can be a very valuable input in enhancing probability of winning current deals. AI and smart algorithms can effec-tively identify a set of tactics from data on past deals and recommend winning actions. However, a major challenge is to collect adequate rel-evant deal data of past wins or losses from the sales force. Very few ac-count managers would have the pa-tience to type in their success tactics in an email or a web page. A conver-sational platform makes the data col-lection effort much simpler and scales more easily across the enterprise.Talent acquisition is another area where NLP and AI is making its pres-ence felt. While finding the right tal-ent is of critical importance in knowl-edge industries such as ours, most internal teams are swamped by the sheer number of resumes they receive against an open requisition. While AI can help build a shortlist quickly, NLP helps increase the true positives in the shortlist by automated interac-tion with potential candidates while maintaining a positive experience.Another use case we can look for-ward to is in team collaboration. Em-ployees spend considerable amount of time in business meetings and a significant amount of action items from these interactions are lost over time. It is not inconceivable for a platform to parse a Webex meeting recording (speech to text), identify the action items (machine learning and attentive moment retrieval) and track the action to completion on IN MY OPINIONBy Anil Nileshwar, Director IT Infrastructure services, CiscoEVOLUTION OF CONVERSATIONAL PLATFORMSAnil Nileshwar
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