Avaya CEO Alan Maserak Explains the Company’s ‘Experience Platform’ Rebrand
In an exclusive interview with UC Today earlier this week, Avaya CEO Alan Maserak revealed that the company had rebranded its cloud contact centre technology to Experience Platform as part of its ongoing portfolio transformation.
Avaya exited Chapter 11 earlier this week, giving it a fresh start having spent around two years struggling with its finances. Describing itself as the “leader in customer experience and cloud solution”, the contact centre is at the heart of Avaya’s portfolio and is essential to its recovery roadmap. Rebranding its CCaaS solution as the Avaya Experience platform helps usher in this new era of Avaya.
Maserak said:
The reason we call it the Experience Platform is that we fundamentally believe where the market is moving is in providing the underlying technology to a business to help enable their customer and employee experience.”
The interview covered various topics, including the financial mechanics of how Avaya has restructured its debt and how “tough” it was to see shareholders and employees struggle during the bankruptcy process.
Other subjects touched on Avaya’s revamped partnership with RingCentral to possible future acquisitions and a potential return to the stock market.
Salesforce has launched Slack GPT
Salesforce has launched Slack GPT to boost business productivity by leveraging CRM and conversational data.
The new conversational AI technology introduces AI features into Slack, generative AI app integrations, and the ability to assess and use customer insights via the Customer 360 and Data Cloud. Slack GPT’s arrival follows up the release of Salesforce’s Einstein GPT, which builds upon Einstein AI to provide agent-assist innovations within the Service Cloud application.
“Generative AI has enormous potential to redefine how work is done and unlock significant business productivity,” commented Lidiane Jones, CEO of Slack. “The real power of this technology is when AI can analyse and act on the most valuable data from a company’s most trusted resource — its own internal knowledge.”
Jones posited that Slack GPT is “the conversational AI platform of the future”, and it will help customers tap into trusted data and employee knowledge so they can work smarter and faster. Native AI built into Slack can seamlessly integrate AI into the user experience. AI-powered writing assistance and conversation summaries, for example, will be accessible from within Slack.
ChatGPT Momentum Is Driving Enterprise-Grade AI Adoption, According to Gartner
In a survey consisting of over 2,500 executive leaders, Gartner found that 45 percent of business execs highlighted the current publicity cycle of ChatGPT as a prominent factor behind their own enterprise adoption of AI.
Frances Karamouzis, a VP Analyst at Gartner, explained:
The generative AI frenzy shows no signs of abating. Organizations are scrambling to determine how much cash to pour into generative AI solutions, which products are worth the investment, when to get started and how to mitigate the risks that come with this emerging technology.”
The report also found that 70 percent of organizations are currently in the “exploration” stages of generative AI research and implementation, with 19 percent in later pilot or production stages. Additionally, Gartner uncovered that 68 percent of executives believe investment into enterprise-grade generative AI significantly outweighs the risks.
According to those involved in Gartner’s survey, the benefits of enterprise-grade generative AI include customer experience/retention, revenue growth, cost optimization, and business continuity.
