Every year Gartner scans the horizons for companies who offer technology or services that are innovative, impactful, or intriguing. Gartner analysts might ask themselves: What’s something that customers could not do before? What technical innovation is focused on producing business impact? Or what new technology or service appears to be addressing systemic challenges?

This year’s Gartner report naming ASAPP as a “Cool Vendor” affirms our efforts at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and customer experience (CX). We entered into this $600 billion industry because we wanted to create real change—building machine learning products that augment and automate the world’s workflows—and address the most costly and painful parts of CX that are largely ignored today.

Despite billions of dollars spent on technology designed to keep customers away from speaking with agents—starting with IVRs a few decades ago and most recently, chatbots—the human agent is still there. And in record numbers. Most large B2C organizations have actually increased their agent population over the last several years. And it is these human agents, the ones who represent your brand to millions of customers, who have been most ignored by innovators.

By embracing automation—not as a replacement, but as augmentor—to human agents, the entire performance of sales and service contact centers is dramatically elevated.

Macario Namie

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As ASAPP followers know well, this is why we exist. By embracing automation—not as a replacement, but as augmentor—to human agents, the entire performance of sales and service contact centers is dramatically elevated. Real-time continuous intelligence techniques are used to tell every agent the right thing to say and do, live during an interaction. The company benefits from radical increases in organizational productivity, while the customers get exactly what they want—the right answer in the fastest possible time.

We’re proud of the academic recognition ASAPP Research achieves for advancing the state of the art of automatic speech recognition (ASR), NLP, and Task-Oriented Dialogue. However, it’s the business results of this applied research that keeps ASAPP moving forward. We celebrate this Gartner recognition with our customers like American Airlines, Dish and JetBlue, who are seeing the business results of AI in their customer service.

So what makes a company applying artificial intelligence for customer experience a “Cool Vendor?” Well, check out the Gartner report. However, I would say it’s our exclusive focus on human performance within CX. Learn more by reading this year’s Gartner Cool Vendor report.

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