OneReach.ai
No Code/Low Code Configuration for Conversational Intelligence

One of the top technology trends for 2019 that we are watching is the democratization and adoption of AI. We met with a top company who has been working on what they refer to as the “self driving company” for 5 years to get their perspective. OneReach.ai offers a no code/low code platform for creating AI solutions to companies primarily for creating chatbots on many channels including intelligent bots that answer the phone.

In an exclusive interview with CIO Applications, Robb Wilson, founder of OneReach.ai, shares some interesting insights about their low code platform, conversational UI tools, the role of AI in their platform, and their roadmap for the future.

What was the idea that spurred the inception of the company?

I’ve been studying human-computer interaction for most of my adult life. Having previously built Effective UI, a global agency which Forrester named one of the first UX agencies, I realized that there was going to be a dramatic change in how people interface with technology. The rise of messaging and voice interaction was eminent and this was going to require different tools and a different way of thinking about UX design. Instead of designing a graphical UI experience, designers and developers would be designing conversations. But the common tools like Sketch and Photoshop would not work and the world needed new tools that were appropriate for designing conversations.

In the process we realized that not only can we build tools that helped articulate a design experience, we could bring them to life straight from the design without much effort on the designers end. We knew this paradigm shift from graphical UIs to conversational UIs offered us the opportunity to help define the process for building them just as we helped redefine the process for building graphical UI applications. So we designed and built a platform that let non-developers/experience designers sit in the cockpit and create compelling conversational experiences with little to no coding required. Today over 80 percent of our users are non-developers collectively creating thousands of bots and we lead the industry in maturity with the recent release of CS2, our second generation platform, and as a result now find ourselves being featured in Gartner reports and compared to the likes of Microsoft, IBM, and Google.

How would you define the no code/low code landscape?

Low-code/no-code platforms are commonly used to build internal applications and mobile apps. For us, we wanted to tackle a much harder problem; using no-code interfaces to democratize access to two of the most challenging technical categories: AI and communications.

The flexibility of what one can build is what really differentiates between no code solutions. When customers implement platforms that aren’t flexible enough, they have no option but to adapt their business practices to the software or scrap it and rebuild using traditional coding methods. In most cases that defeats the purpose; it limits innovation. We get around this by allowing customers to expand the functionality of their no-code solution by writing custom code offering the best of both worlds.

How does the entire process from when the customer approaches you until the time you deliver the solution work?

With those new to AI we encourage them to start with internally automating operational processes, like conversations with employees, before moving to automating customer conversations. In this way, companies can be familiarized with the AI and the process without the risks of making a mistake with customers. With CS2 this process moves fairly quickly for most. The platform allows users to design and build innovative solutions, and share them with each other organically. By automating tasks for operational use our customers derive ROI quickly, paving the way to external use cases.

What are the factors that set OneReach apart from the competition?

The difference between a successful AI project and a failed one is usually in the bot training, not the chosen tools which is why we allow customers to take an agile approach to AI training. By providing seamless human in the loop training for real time and just in time training of AI systems, CS2 allows customers to deploy solutions without a huge up front training project. This combined with our tools that allow experience designers to create and craft conversational experiences quickly without code (and only wherever there are gaps have developers step in) mean very agile project process.

An XD (experience designer) can make changes in real time, including the ability to train the AI models on the fly. AI is a team sport and therefore, our platform involves all roles including experience designers and information architects, not just developers.

Also OneReach.ai is channel agnostic, which means we have decoupled business logic and integrations from the communication channel to ensure customers can re-use their code-less objects to create truly omnichannel experiences; but in a way that allows them to fully utilize the full functionality of each one.

How does the future of the company look like 12-18 months down the line?

We keep moving down the no code user sophistication ladder. Today there are experienced developers, business analysts, and data scientists all collaborating on their desired solutions. Within each of those roles our goal is to keep moving to the least experienced personas in each category. We will keep inching away, down the stack, from more sophisticated to less experienced individuals with an ultimate goal of allowing anybody who can use a computer to be able to create complex AI solutions that meet their needs. Through this comes the democratization of AI, a level playing field if you will.