Wysdom.AI: Comprehensive Cognitive Care Solution

Jeff Brunet, Co-Founder and President

Enabling enterprises to deliver artificial intelligence (AI) based support across all care channels, Wysdom.AI increases customer satisfaction and reduces care expenses by leveraging its cognitive care solution. In an interview with CIO Applications, Ian Collins and Jeff Brunet, co-founders of Wysdom, talk about their cognitive care solution.

What led to the inception of Wysdom.AI?

Collins: In 2003, we had established Mobile Diagnostix, which was a precursor to our current business. The challenge at the time—when smartphones had emerged in the market—was that customer service demands had changed from, “I dropped a call” to “I cannot connect to the internet.” The core functionality of our business was analyzing the problems on cellular devices and building a library of all the different challenges and combinations that cause problems along with their appropriate solutions. After HP acquired our company, a few years later, Brunet and I founded Wysdom.AI, bolstered by the belief that combining natural language processing technology with machine learning and massive amounts of customer data will result in a more intelligent solution. Aided by an excellent technical development team that followed us from Mobile Diagnostix, we deliver cognitive care through all contact channels.

What sets Wysdom apart from other solutions in the market?

Collins: We believe that enterprises need a comprehensive suite that covers all their care channels with a chatbot being just one of the many means of communication with consumers. Wysdom’s cognitive care solution allows enterprises to deliver customer care across all channels in several languages. Companies require a comprehensive solution because investing in each independent area across different business support channels creates redundancy, duplication, and inconsistent messages. The AI needs to be trained to learn from its interactions, constantly adding new questions and answers to the training library. This begins with analyzing customer behavior and the feedback received and automating the determination of whether they were satisfied with the experience or not. Training such a system requires machine learning and linguistics experts, which generally cannot be managed in-house. We offer a comprehensive platform and a service to operate it every day to ensure that the AI models are improved across the board very quickly. With regards to training, enterprises have two options when launching an AI application, whether to start from scratch or leverage a solution like Wysdom that features a massive corpus related to customer care. Currently, we have 200,000 of the most popular questions that end-customers ask and all the models are trained and ready to interpret such questions and map the appropriate content. From day one, we are able to bring this massive amount of training data that helps companies launch faster.

Brunet: What differentiates our platform from other competitors is our experience with cognitive care and our AI supervision team that helps train the system to keep it ahead of customer issues.

Wysdom’s cognitive care solution allows enterprises to deliver customer care across all digital channels in several languages

Most vendors limit themselves to only providing platforms, leaving 100 percent of the system training to the enterprise, which lead to chatbot and AI implementation failures from a lack of training.

Ian Collins, Co-Founder and CEO

How do you approach potential clients?

Brunet: Due to our extensive corpus coupled with a large set of trained intents and utterances that bind them, we have a good idea of what companies require in the customer care space. The contextual clues derived from what customers want, helps us train our platform and we use that data to develop a dashboard and analytics platform. This helps enterprises access valuable information and have a granular view about customer queries— what type of services are driving the most support calls, which products have a high customer satisfaction rate, and those with the most complaints.

Can you highlight the features of Wysdom?

Collins: In many cases, major vendors provide an AI platform with a very general set of tools. Our goal is to bring in a full package solution for this one particular need. Our cognitive care application includes everything an enterprise needs including multichannel integration and automatic language translation. Wysdom is the brain that monitors the different communication channels and then constantly learns and improves to respond appropriately.

Brunet: The Wysdom solution is a full suite that includes the tech stack, the operational tools, a massive corpus, and an experienced AI supervision team. At the higher level, it is about providing a solution that allows our customers to answer the end user questions that originate from any channel, including social media applications, smartphones, or through a website. We pushed this concept of a single brain with an omnichannel focus to eliminate the disparity in the answers, and the complexity in overhead created by customers communicating through different communication channels. One of the things that we emphasize with our solution is personalization. We want to provide definite detailed answers and for that, we integrate into various back-office systems in an enterprise.

Could you discuss a client success story?

Collins: We had a client that wanted to transition to digital channels for customer care, but they could not find a suitable solution that fit their need for multichannel support and they lacked a specialized team in-house to train the cognitive care system. They wanted a full service that included all the training and operations required to help the system improve with every customer interaction. Furthermore, they did not want to be limited to a specific AI stack, but instead wanted the flexibility to leverage a new one. Basically, the client’s needs aligned perfectly with all the capabilities that we were offering and we implemented Wysdom in their environment. While, initially, our platform handled only 3 to 5 percent of all traffic related to customer queries, it has presently grown to over 40 percent.

What is the roadmap for the company?

Collins: We are focused on expanding our core business capabilities as technical innovations continue to roll out—new natural language processing frameworks, better operational tools. While we engage with many verticals today, we are continuing to branch out across industries and we will do so cautiously as we want to form a good understanding of every industry that we operate in. It is important to cover every channel that a customer utilizes to communicate with an enterprise including retail interaction, store kiosks, customer service, sales, and marketing.