From a landmark for Microsoft in CX to a big-name partnership, here are some extracts from our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Microsoft’s CX Business Surpasses $1 Billion in Sales
Microsoft’s customer experience business achieved over $1 billion in annual sales.
The software giant’s cloud segment brought in $30.3 billion, which was a key driver behind beating overall revenue expectations for its final quarter of 2023.
Customer experience’s success was replicated by its service, finance, and supply chain offerings, which each raked in more than $1 billion in annual sales, with Dynamics hitting $5 billion.
Satya Nadella, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, said: “Organizations are asking not only how – but how fast – they can apply this next generation of AI to address the biggest opportunities and challenges they face – safely and responsibly.
We remain focused on leading the new AI platform shift, helping customers use the Microsoft Cloud to get the most value out of their digital spend, and driving operating leverage.
Copilot was front and center from a product perspective, integrating and adapting its AI capabilities to Dynamics 365 and other parts of the business, including Microsoft Sales, Microsoft 365, GitHub, Azure, Power Platform, Windows, Security, and the web.
Nadella announced on the quarterly earnings call that Copilot Stack is available from today on Azure.
This includes everything from the Azure AI toolchain, such as Azure OpenAI, and all the essential elements of its operational data stores to apply generative AI technology for an array of purposes, like responding to customers or summarising meetings. (Read on…).
Twilio Teams Up with AWS In the Name of Predictive AI
Twilio has extended its relationship with AWS to advance its predictive AI capabilities.
Announced at the AWS Summit in New York, the extended partnership bolsters the value proposition of Twilio CustomerAI – a generative AI solution launched last month.
The solution extracts data from a customer’s conversations with sales, service, and marketing teams via large language models (LLMs).
That data – which may include intent, sentiment, and qualitative insights – then filters into the customer’s Golden Profile in Segment, Twilio’s customer data platform (CDP).
With all that data inside those Golden Profiles, end-users can now apply Amazon SageMaker to further their understanding of customers.
SageMaker offers machine-learning-powered tools, which Twilio customers can now access out-of-the-box, thanks to the strengthened partnership.
Those tools will sweep through profile data and anticipate customer actions, supporting proactive customer retention campaigns and initiatives to spotlight VIP customers.
By surfacing more customer insights, Twilio aims to promote the close relationships many customers have with local businesses on a digital scale.
Alex Millet, Senior Director of Product at Twilio, doubles down on this point. “It’s clear to me that Twilio has the strongest dataset of customer engagement interactions and the platform to make this happen,” he said. (Read on…).
NICE Launches Industry Benchmarks, Brings GenAI to Customer Experience Measurement
NICE has unveiled Industry Benchmarks, a solution that allows businesses to compare their service teams’ performance against industry standards.
By launching the solution, NICE leverages its wealth of anonymized contact center conversation data to create benchmarks across 75 verticals.
These benchmarks cover many metrics, including customer satisfaction, handling times, schedule efficiency, complaint levels, and more.
In addition, Industry Benchmarks tracks insights such as agent behaviors, call reasons, coaching levels, sales effectiveness, automation maturity, and more.
As a result, contact centers can uncover how they stack up against the competition while spotting opportunities to differentiate and excel.
Moreover, they may do so “with a click of a button”. Indeed, leaders can extract insights by simply entering written prompts; the large language models (LLMs) NICE leverages will do the rest.
By harnessing LLMs this way, NICE brings another innovative generative AI use case to the contact center table and expands its Enlighten AI suite. (Read on…).
SAP Pours $1BN+ Into Generative AI Startups
SAP has committed to investing in several generative AI startups to make their technologies more readily available to the vendor’s service, sales, and commerce customers.
These startups include Aleph Alpha GmbH, Anthropic PBC, and Cohere, which will add their AI technologies to SAP’s enterprise AI ecosystem.
The company is making a $1+ billion investment commitment to back each startup through its investing arm, Sapphire Ventures LLC.
Sebastian Steinhaeuser, Chief Strategy Officer, SAP SE, said:
We are at a watershed moment, with generative AI poised to fundamentally change how businesses run.
“SAP is committed to creating an enterprise AI ecosystem for the future that complements our world-class business applications suite and helps our customers unlock their full potential.”
In May, SAP announced partnerships with Microsoft, Google Cloud, IBM, and others to improve its AI offering. (Read on…).
