Text analytics, and specifically, speech-to-text technologies are key here and will be the most predominant form of AI in businesses in 2019.

Titan Panel: The state of Conversational AI, and where the 'platforms' are taking it

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We take a look at where three giant platforms (IBM, Amazon, Microsoft) have taken conversational AI, and why. Three points of view will be shared, representing three different perspectives (Amazon Alexa and consumer, Microsoft Cortana and business, and IBM Watson and industry) and what are the major investments in NLP and other key trends in voice and text conversation — through assistants, screens, mobile integrations and more. Here we discuss the most compelling areas of conversational AI that companies need to be aware of.

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Mitch Mason, Senior Offering Manager, Watson Assistant, IBM, Lisa Falkson, Senior VUI Designer, Amazon,

Noelle LarCharite, Principal PM Manager, MSAI, Microsoft

Moderator: Amit Ben, Head of Technology & AI, LogMeIn

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PANEL

12:00 - 12:30 pm

Continental 6

The best brand chatbots

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A look at some of the most sophisticated brand chatbot experiences, and the technologies and other strategies that they use. The best ones do use plenty of NLP, but they also know when to move from open form to rules-based, to web links, and yes...humans. We also look at which of the NLP platforms are being used (Google, Cortana, Watson, Alexa, etc.), and what sort of tech layers or customization are on top.

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Piers Lingle, SVP of Customer Experience, Comcast,

Ambreen Molitor, Senior Director, Digital Product Lab at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, 

Burak Arik, CEO of MaxiTech Inc., a subsidiary of Isbank

Moderator: Vamsi Eswara, Chief Technology Officer of Conversational AI, Cognizant

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PANEL 

3:30 - 3:55 pm

Continental 6

Big picture: Where we are in understanding natural language

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This talk will build up the necessary concepts to understand the most recent breakthroughs in natural language processing. It will start by addressing the relationship between representation and prediction in Deep Learning and Machine Learning more broadly. This will serve as a foundation for understanding transfer learning in NLP, the momentous impact large, pre-trained systems have had on the representations used for NLP tasks, and two important directions for future research. The first future direction is multitask learning. Even with improved representations, systems are often customized for individual tasks. The Natural Language Decathlon (decaNLP) is a multitask learning benchmark for studying general NLP models that can perform a variety of complex, natural language tasks. decaNLP challenges the community to find models that are less task-specific. The second future direction involves extracting world knowledge from large, pre-trained systems for common sense reasoning, one of the hardest tasks in NLP. CAGE is a new model that explains its reasoning about common sense questions and improves common sense question answering. With the vast improvement in representation learning, continued research will likely bring increased improvements for these key areas of NLP: multitask learning, common sense reasoning, and explainable models.

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Bryan McCann, Research Scientist, Salesforce

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PREZO

3:55 - 4:20 pm

Continental 6

Ecommerce, messaging and conversion:
Lessons from the leaders

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We discuss how NLP is being combined with predictive analytics and personalized data to drive superior results in ecommerce and retail generally.

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Ella Hilal, Director of Data, Shopify,

Bahman Bahmani, VP of Data Science and Engineering, Rakuten

Moderator: Brian Bagdasarian, Senior Manager - Digital Engagement & Conversational Marketing Strategy, LogMeIn

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PANEL 

4:40 - 5:10  pm

Continental 6

Customer support: Impressive stories you’ll want to write home to your CMO about

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A panel of experts talk about some of the best experiences we’re seeing in customer support, how they were designed, deployed, iterated, and achieved results.

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Vishy Krishnamoorthy, Chief Product Officer, Humana 

Scott Bajtos, Chief Customer Officer, VMware

Moderator: Julie Ask, Vice President, Forrester Research

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PANEL 

11:45 - 12:10 pm

Continental 6

Customer journey: Making it personal, but not creepy

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To get amazing results with AI and the customer journey, companies are pushing to communicate with as much personalization as possible. But the trick is not going too far.

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Chris Hansen, Senior Director, Digital, TGI Fridays, Jessica Lachs, VP of Analytics, Doordash, Chris Williams, CPO, iheartmedia

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Moderator: Lauren McCollem, Vice President, Marketing, Customer Engagement & Support Solutions, LogMeIn

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PANEL 

12:10 - 12:35 pm

Continental 6

Modern CX: The Impact of AI Across the Entire Customer Journey

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When we think about AI in CX we often think about a customer-facing chatbot helping customers self-serve. While AI has made an amazing impact on the future of digital customer service, that scenario is only addressing a small part of the overall journey. This session will dive into how AI can be used beyond the contact center to make a lasting impression on customers from the very start of their journey, through the sales cycle, and into post-sale support – both online and in-person.

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Ryan Lester, Senior Director, Customer Experience Technologies, LogMeIn

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PREZO

3:00 - 3:25  pm

Continental 6

Operationalizing Voice AI: From Hype to Reality

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We live in an era where, all too often, claims of conversational AI are, well, just talk. At TD Ameritrade, an investing services and education behemoth with 11 million retail accounts amounting to $1.3 trillion , they’re walking the walk. Through chat- and voice-enabled integrations with companies like Amazon, WeChat, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and more, TD Ameritrade is tapping into the power of voice to deliver state of the art customer experiences. But the path to AI success isn’t always easy. In this session, TD Ameritrade director of AI, Chat, and Emerging Technology, Beaumont Vance, will offer a glimpse under the hood at what’s made TD Ameritrade’s results possible, and offers lessons learned to those seeking to turn conversational AI’s promise into reality.

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Beaumont Vance, Director of Digital, AI and Automation, TD Ameritrade

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PREZO

3:25 - 3:50 pm

Continental 6

Building a Virtual Agent, One that can Actually Correspond and Engage With Your Users

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There's been an explosion of messaging and bot efforts from companies, now that they can communicate and engage with customers directly on mobile and elsewhere. There's been an explosion of bot frameworks, NLP offerings, and other technologies to help. But how do you build a real virtual agent, that pulls from your internal customer data and applications through APIs, to do it right.

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Matt Kravitz, Director of Service Applications, Viewer Experience, Hulu,

Rhett Blanch, Platform Lead Architect, Pizza Hut,

Akhil Talwar, Sr. Product Manager, LogMeIn,

Jonathan Rosenberg, CTO & Head of AI, Five9,

Callan Schebella, CEO, Inference Solutions

Moderators: Nancy Jamison, Principal Analyst, Frost & Sullivan

 

PANEL 

4:10 - 4:50 pm

Continental 6