Artificial Intelligence is one of the most talked about yet least understood technologies around right now.
Despite being in the works for years, and in popular culture even longer, most of us are still not sure of what to make of it.
Beyond the fun of creating images on DALL-E and toying around with ChatGPT, organizations are trying to figure out how to integrate it into their teams to improve efficiency and productivity.
Sure, it might be useful in helping to get that first draft of an email going. But what else can it do for us beyond writing out some generic texts? And how does it apply from a UCaaS POV and help us in the rest of our work?
Defining Artificial Intelligence
For clarity’s sake, it should be said that Artificial Intelligence is a general term for a wide range of technologies that leverage impressive computing power and data analytics to increase productivity and gain insights from across massive data sets.
This includes technologies like machine learning and deep learning with their subsets of neural networks like large language models. The most well-known version being OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
It should be said as well that AI tools are only as good as their data sets. This can be a problem because they can on occasion make things up like we saw on more than one occasion when lawyers were fined for submitting fake cases generated by ChatGPT.
They are also highly dependent on how good we are at asking the right questions. An AI tool can access all your company’s data. But it is still up to you to know what questions are relevant. Though that may change as it improves.
AI in UCaaS
So how does AI shift from a shiny new toy to something useful for work?
The short answer is that we are still trying to figure out how best to use it, but we are seeing some early uses in having AI joining our conference calls.
Speaking with CallTower’s Chief Revenue Officer William Rubio, he says that Cisco Webex and Zoom are already leveraging AI tools for useful features like summarizing calls and helping users to pick out what they think are the most valuable bits of information from a conversation.
These might be action items to follow up on after the call or even basic note-taking that allows the participants to focus on the call's content basic note taking that allows the participants to focus on the content of the call.
Not to be left out, Microsoft is also a significant player in the AI space. Beyond their investment in OpenAI, the good folks up in Redwood have been hard at work on their own innovation that goes harder and wider than the competition.
The Differential: Harnessing the Power of Microsoft 365’s Ecosystem
For most organizations, Microsoft is the default. Their suite of services under the umbrella of Microsoft 365 is the standard for how work gets done. Tools like Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, and Teams form the backbone of business.
Rubio tells UC Today that, “by adding a layer of AI in the form of Copilot on top of this work suite, Microsoft is able to connect all of your solutions together, automating interactions between them to supercharge productivity.”
Take for example you have a call on Teams.
What if Copilot could then take the summary of that call and create a presentation for you in PowerPoint? The ability to go across different tools, removing the busy work, opens a lot of opportunities.
How to use Copilot in a Call Center
Humans will always bring nuance and creativity to their work. But if there is one thing that computers are good at it is dealing with large sets of data very quickly.
So how does this apply for UCaaS use cases?
