Conversational AI: What we’ve learned from millions of AI conversations for thousands of customers

In this presentation, we will introduce our artificial intelligence approach to creating, deploying, and continuously improving, an automated sales assistant that engages in a genuinely human conversation, at scale, with every one of an organization’s sales leads. We will present empirical data to assess how personalized, responsive and helpful the AI assistant is. We share our observations on the ability of the assistant to help in increasing sales and delve deeply into how an artificial intelligence assistant can free humans to focus on higher-value activities, and even lead businesses to employ more people, not fewer, as a result of implementing AI. We will delve into the development of our systems, which have been trained using state of the art machine learning algorithms over linguistic features computed from millions of real conversations between leads and clients, and share observations regarding the rationale on why the assistant was successful in increasing sales, improving marketing and gathering critical business intelligence.

Dr. Sid J Reddy is a recognized expert in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Linguistics who designed, developed and contributed to dozens of NLP systems used in production in a wide array of use-cases and industry verticals (healthcare, business intelligence, life sciences, legal and e-commerce). His research ranged from acquiring lexical resources through distributed word vector representations learned from big data and applying them to improve state of the art in sequential labeling tasks to using functional theories of grammar for association extraction and question-answering. Dr. Reddy graduated with a Bachelors in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology and moved to the US to develop an effective approach to information extraction with limited training data for his PhD. His interest in NLP drove him to develop text-mining infrastructures from scratch at two technology startups and at the Mayo Clinic, and then to Northwestern University where he founded an NLP Lab as a faculty and is currently an adjunct faculty. Most recently, Sid was at Microsoft as a Principal Applied Scientist. Sid is a patented inventor, sought-after industry speaker and published author with research featured in over 50 peer-reviewed publications and technical conferences. He is also currently an adjunct faculty at Northwestern University and UC Berkeley.