Transforming Lives with AI: Avaya's ACES Team Inspires at Enterprise Connect

Avaya Customer Experience Services Wows the Audience with Concrete Examples of “AI in Action” at Enterprise Connect 2024

This week at Enterprise Connect, I had the pleasure of attending an insightful presentation by Louise Daley from Avaya's Customer Experience Services (ACES) team. The ACES group works with major global brands to innovate their customer experience using cutting-edge AI technologies. What set Louise's session apart was how masterfully she translated AI concepts into concrete, real-world applications.

While some #EnterpriseConnect 2024 sessions were either too conceptual to be actionable or too technical to consider business implications, Louise hit the perfect balance. She connected the dots between seemingly disparate use cases of AI - from recognizing hundreds of bread and pastry varieties in Japan to detect cancer with 99% accuracy, to improving agent well-being by analyzing sentiment and adjusting workloads in real-time.

A few key takeaways:

• AI-powered virtual agents are becoming more human-like - remembering context, learning independently, and engaging customers more naturally across channels. This empowers consumers to self-serve and solve issues faster.
• By tracking sentiment scores, facial expressions, and interaction complexity, companies can now use AI to monitor and improve the mental well-being of contact center agents dealing with challenging customer issues. This helps create a culture of empathy.
• The future of AI is in empowering each individual consumer with their own personalized agent that can advise them and even autonomously complete tasks on their behalf - whether it's troubleshooting a robot vacuum, refilling a prescription, or customizing an educational plan.
• While AI does introduce some risks that need to be mitigated, such as data privacy, the potential for AI to expand human capabilities for good is tremendous. It's up to us to steer AI in an empowering direction.

Throughout her presentation, Louise highlighted pioneering work Avaya is doing for customers in healthcare, humanitarian aid, utilities, government services and more. The common thread is employing AI to make experiences more effortless, personalized and impactful for both employees and end consumers.

Promoting Agent Wellness with AI

One of the most compelling examples Louise provided centered around a major utility company that had recently transitioned more of their contact center staff to serving digital channels. In theory, this move made sense - digital interactions tend to be more efficient and the company even incentivized the change with promotions and higher pay.

However, they soon realized that voice calls into the contact center tended to be more complex and emotionally charged - often from customers facing electricity shut-offs who needed empathetic support. By siphoning off these calls to a smaller group of agents, they inadvertently created an environment detrimental to those employees' mental well-being.

The company worked with Avaya to implement an AI-powered agent wellness system that tracks sentiment scores and facial expressions in real-time, and automatically adjusts the volume and type of interactions routed to each agent to manageable levels. By proactively monitoring for signs of distress and strategically rotating agents to different interaction types, they created a healthier, more empathetic culture.

Eliminating Language Barriers

Another powerful use case Louise described was a global humanitarian aid organization using Avaya's AI solutions to provide real-time translation support, enabling them to quickly serve displaced and refugee populations in their native languages during crises.

The organization also deployed natural language AI to automatically handle more straightforward requests and questions, while seamlessly escalating more nuanced situations to human aid workers, along with the full interaction history and context. This allows aid to be deployed faster and more efficiently during disasters when every minute counts.

Ushering in the Era of Personalized AI Agents

Perhaps most exciting was Louise's vision for the future of individualized AI agents that can autonomously learn about you and complete tasks on your behalf. She provided a glimpse into some of Avaya's early work in spaces like:

• Healthcare: Virtual agents that integrate with IoT wearables to track patients' vitals, medications, and symptoms and provide proactive advice and alerts
• Education: AI tutors that develop custom curriculums tailored to each student's learning style, pace, and challenges
• Consumer: Personal AI assistants that can independently troubleshoot home device issues, reorder essential items, or negotiate billings and contracts

Louise emphasized that the goal of all of these solutions is to augment and empower humans to live better, not to replace human capabilities and connection. I was struck by her call for all of us in the industry to actively steer AI innovation in a direction that expands equity, access, and human potential. With great technological power comes great responsibility.

After seeing Louise's presentation, it's clear that the organizations that will lead in customer experience are those rapidly progressing from AI as a concept to AI deployed in production, generating real results.

AI is often discussed in future-facing terms, but Louise demonstrated that leading organizations are already harnessing AI in the here and now to make experiences more seamless, tailored, and empathetic. That's an inspiring call-to-action for any CX professional.

Closing Thoughts

Louise's passion for her work shines through in every aspect of her presentation. As she shares examples of how AI is transforming lives - from helping cancer patients receive faster diagnoses to enabling aid workers to comfort disaster victims in their native language - her face lights up with genuine excitement. It's clear that for Louise, her role at Avaya is much more than just a job; it's a calling to make a real difference in people's lives through technology. She speaks with the fervor of a true believer in AI's potential to solve pressing human challenges, but also with the nuance and responsibility of someone committed to wielding that power ethically.

Louise's deep knowledge of both the technical complexities and human impacts of AI is evident, but it's her heartfelt dedication to using innovation to expand human potential that leaves the most lasting impression. Listening to Louise, you can't help but feel inspired by her vision and energized by her passion to build a brighter future, one AI-powered experience at a time.

And I have felt this same sense of passion with every ACES team member I have met.  I guess when you are working with some of the biggest organizations to help save lives, navigate customers through financial crisis, to enable the homeless to have housing, it’s impossible to not have an extraordinary sense of purpose and pride!

I left Louise's session energized by the art of the possible when it comes to applying AI to improve experiences - for customers, for employees, and for society at large. Avaya's ACES team is at the forefront of exploring new frontiers of AI in service of people and it was exciting to get an inside look at their advances.

Avaya is enabling enterprises to make that leap and harness AI to solve problems in creative new ways. For anyone interested in applied AI innovation, I highly recommend connecting with the ACES team to learn more.