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Tag: ceo thoughts

  • Benefits of Using Chatbots: How Companies Are Using Them to Their Advantange

    Bots are the new black! The entire tech industry seems to be buzzing with “bot” fever. Me and my co-founders often see a “bot” company and discuss its business model. Chirag Jog has always been enthusiastic about the bot wave while I have been mostly pessimistic, especially about B2C bots. We should consider that there are many types of “bots” — chat bots, voice bots, AI assistants, robotic process automation(RPA) bots, conversational agents within apps or websites, etc.

    Over the last year, we have been building some interesting chat and voice based bots which has given me some interesting insights. I hope to lay down my thoughts on bots in some detail and with some structure.

    What are bots?

    Bots are software programs which automate tasks that humans would otherwise do themselves. Bots are developed using machine learning software and are expected to aggregate data to make the interface more intelligent and intuitive. There have always been simple rule-based bots which provide a very specific service with low utility. In the last couple of years, we are seeing emergence of intelligent bots that can serve more complex use-cases.

    Why now?

    Machine learning, NLP and AI technologies have matured enabling practical applications where bots can actually do intelligent work >75% of the times. Has general AI been solved? No. But is it good enough to do the simple things well and give hope for more complex things? Yes.

    Secondly, there are billions of DAUs on Whatsapp & Facebook Messenger. There are tens of millions of users on enterprise messaging platforms like Slack, Skype & Microsoft Teams. Startups and enterprises want to use this distribution channel and will continue to experiment aggressively to find relevant use-cases. Millennials are very comfortable using the chat and voice interfaces for a broader variety of use-cases since they used chat services as soon as they came online. As millennials become a growing part of the workforce, the adoption of bots may increase.

    Thirdly, software is becoming more prevalent and more complex. Data is exploding and making sense of this data is getting harder and requiring more skill. Companies are experimenting with bots to provide an “easy to consume” interface to casual users. So non-experts can use the bot interface while experts can use the mobile or web application for the complex workflows. This is mostly true for B2B & enterprise. A good example is how Slack has become the system of engagement for many companies (including at @velotiotech). We require all the software we use (Gitlab, Asana, Jira, Google Docs, Zoho, Marketo, Zendesk, etc.) to provide notifications into Slack. Over time, we expect to start querying the respective Slack bots for information. Only domain experts will log into the actual SaaS applications.

    Types of Bots

    B2C Chat-Bots

    Consumer focused bots use popular messaging and social platforms like Facebook, Telegram, Kik, WeChat, etc. Some examples of consumer bots include weather, e-commerce, travel bookings, personal finance, fitness, news. These are mostly inspired by WeChat which owns the China market and is the default gateway to various internet services. These bots show up as “contacts” in these messenger platforms.

    Strategically, the B2C bots are basically trying to get around the distribution monopoly of Apple & Google Android. As many studies have indicated, getting mobile users to install apps is getting extremely hard. Facebook, Skype, Telegram hope to become the system of engagement and distribution for various apps thereby becoming an alternate “App Store” or “Bot Store”.

    I believe that SMS is a great channel for basic chatbot functionality. Chatbots with SMS interface can be used by all age groups and in remote parts of the world where data infrastructure is lacking. I do expect to see some interesting companies use SMS chatbots to build new business models. Also mobile bots that sniff or integrate with as many of your mobile apps to provide cross-platform and cross-app “intelligence” will succeed — Google Now is a good example.

    An often cited example is the DoNotPay chatbot which helps people contest parking tickets in the UK. In my opinion, the novelty is in the service and it’s efficiency and not in the chatbot interface as such. Also, I have not met anyone who uses a B2C chatbot even on a weekly or monthly basis.

    B2B Bots

    Enterprise bots are available through platforms and interfaces like Slack, Skype, Microsoft Teams, website chat windows, email assistants, etc. They are focused on collaboration, replacing/augmenting emails, information assistants, support, and speeding up decision-making/communications.

    Most of the enterprise bots solve niche and specific problems. This is a great advantage considering the current state of AI/ML technologies. Many of these enterprise bot companies are also able to augment their intelligence with human agents thereby providing better experiences to users.

    Some of the interesting bots and services in the enterprise space include:

    • x.ai and Clara Labs which provide a virtual assistant to help you setup and manage your meetings.
    • Gong.io and Chorus provide a bot that listens in on sales calls and uses voice-to-text and other machine learning algorithms to help your sales teams get better and close more deals.
    • Astro is building an AI assisted email app which will have multiple interfaces including voice (Echo).
    • Twyla is helping to make chatbots on website more intelligent using ML. It integrates with your existing ZenDesk, LivePerson or Salesforce support.
    • Clarke.ai is a bot which uses AI to take notes for your meeting so you can focus better.
    • Smacc provides AI assisted automated book-keeping for SMBs.
    • Slack is one of the fastest growing SaaS companies and has the most popular enterprise bot store. Slack bots are great for pushing and pulling information & data. All SaaS services and apps should have bots that can emit useful updates, charts, data, links, etc to a specific set of users. This is much better than sending emails to an email group. Simple decisions can be taken within a chat interface using something like Slack Buttons. Instead of receiving an email and opening a web page, most people would prefer approving a leave or an expense right within Slack. Slack/Skype/etc will add the ability to embed “cards” or “webviews” or “interactive sections” within chats. This will enable some more complex use-cases to be served via bots. Most enterprise services have Slack bots and are allowing Slack to be a basic system of engagement.
    • Chatbots or even voice-based bots on websites will be a big deal. Imagine that each website has a virtual support rep or a sales rep available to you 24×7 in most popular languages. All business would want such “agents” or “bots” for greater sales conversions and better support.
    • Automation of backoffice tasks can be a HUGE business. KPOs & BPOs are a huge market sp if you can build software or software-enabled processes to reduce costs, then you can build a significant sized company. Some interesting examples here Automation Anywhere and WorkFusion.

    Voice based Bots

    Amazon had a surprise hit in the consumer electronics space with their Amazon Echo device which is a voice-based assistant. Google recently releases their own voice enabled apps to complete with Echo/Alexa. Voice assistants provide weather, music, searches, e-commerce ordering via NLP voice interface. Apple’s Siri should have been leading this market but as usual Apple is following rather leading the market.

    Voice bots have one great advantage- with miniaturization of devices (Apple Watch, Earpods, smaller wearables), the only practical interface is voice. The other option is pairing the device with your mobile phone — which is not a smooth and intuitive process. Echo is already a great device for listening to music with its Spotify integration — just this feature is enough of a reason to buy it for most families.

    Conclusion

    Bots are useful and here to stay. I am not sure about the form or the distribution channel through which bots will become prevalent. In my opinion, bots are an additional interface to intelligence and application workflows. They are not disrupting any process or industry. Consumers will not shop more due to chat or voice interface bots, employees will not collaborate as desired due to bots, information discovery within your company will not improve due to bots. Actually, existing software and SaaS services are getting more intelligent, predictive and prescriptive. So this move towards “intelligent interfaces” is the real disruption.

    So my concluding predictions:

    • B2C chatbots will turn out to be mostly hype and very few practical scalable use-cases will emerge.
    • Voice bots will see increasing adoption due to smaller device sizes. IoT, wearables and music are excellent use-cases for voice based interfaces. Amazon’s Alexa will become the dominant platform for voice controlled apps and devices. Google and Microsoft will invest aggressively to take on Alexa.
    • B2B bots can be intelligent interfaces on software platforms and SaaS products. Or they can be agents that solve very specific vertical use-cases. I am most bullish about these enterprise focused bots which are helping enterprises become more productive or to increase efficiency with intelligent assistants for specific job functions.

    If you’d like to chat about anything related to this article, what tools we use to build bots, or anything else, get in touch.

    PS: Velotio is helping to bring the power of machine learning to enterprise software businesses. Click here to learn more about Velotio.

  • Surviving & Thriving in the Age of Software Accelerations

    It has almost been a decade since Marc Andreessen made this prescient statement. Software is not only eating the world but doing so at an accelerating pace. There is no industry that hasn’t been challenged by technology startups with disruptive approaches.

    • Automakers are no longer just manufacturing companies: Tesla is disrupting the industry with their software approach to vehicle development and continuous over-the-air software delivery. Waymo’s autonomous cars have driven millions of miles and self-driving cars are a near-term reality. Uber is transforming the transportation industry into a service, potentially affecting the economics and incentives of almost 3–4% of the world GDP!
    • Social networks and media platforms had a significant and decisive impact on the US election results.
    • Banks and large financial institutions are being attacked by FinTech startups like WealthFront, Venmo, Affirm, Stripe, SoFi, etc. Bitcoin, Ethereum and the broader blockchain revolution can upend the core structure of banks and even sovereign currencies.
    • Traditional retail businesses are under tremendous pressure due to Amazon and other e-commerce vendors. Retail is now a customer ownership, recommendations, and optimization business rather than a brick and mortar one.

    Enterprises need to adopt a new approach to software development and digital innovation. At Velotio, we are helping customers to modernize and transform their business with all of the approaches and best practices listed below.

    Agility

    In this fast-changing world, your business needs to be agile and fast-moving. You need to ship software faster, at a regular cadence, with high quality and be able to scale it globally.

    Agile practices allow companies to rally diverse teams behind a defined process that helps to achieve inclusivity and drives productivity. Agile is about getting cross-functional teams to work in concert in planned short iterations with continuous learning and improvement.

    Generally, teams that work in an Agile methodology will:

    • Conduct regular stand-ups and Scrum/Kanban planning meetings with the optimal use of tools like Jira, PivotalTracker, Rally, etc.
    • Use pair programming and code review practices to ensure better code quality.
    • Use continuous integration and delivery tools like Jenkins or CircleCI.
    • Design processes for all aspects of product management, development, QA, DevOps and SRE.
    • Use Slack, Hipchat or Teams for communication between team members and geographically diverse teams. Integrate all tools with Slack to ensure that it becomes the central hub for notifications and engagement.

    Cloud-Native

    Businesses need software that is purpose-built for the cloud model. What does that mean? Software team sizes are now in the hundreds of thousands. The number of applications and software stacks is growing rapidly in most companies. All companies use various cloud providers, SaaS vendors and best-of-breed hosted or on-premise software. Essentially, software complexity has increased exponentially which required a “cloud-native” approach to manage effectively. Cloud Native Computing Foundation defines cloud native as a software stack which is:

    1. Containerized: Each part (applications, processes, etc) is packaged in its own container. This facilitates reproducibility, transparency, and resource isolation.
    2. Dynamically orchestrated: Containers are actively scheduled and managed to optimize resource utilization.
    3. Microservices oriented: Applications are segmented into micro services. This significantly increases the overall agility and maintainability of applications.

    You can deep-dive into cloud native with this blog by our CTO, Chirag Jog.

    Cloud native is disrupting the traditional enterprise software vendors. Software is getting decomposed into specialized best of breed components — much like the micro-services architecture. See the Cloud Native landscape below from CNCF.

    DevOps

    Process and toolsets need to change to enable faster development and deployment of software. Enterprises cannot compete without mature DevOps strategies. DevOps is essentially a set of practices, processes, culture, tooling, and automation that focuses on delivering software continuously with high quality.

    DevOps tool chains & process

    As you begin or expand your DevOps journey, a few things to keep in mind:

    • Customize to your needs: There is no single DevOps process or toolchain that suits all needs. Take into account your organization structure, team capabilities, current software process, opportunities for automation and goals while making decisions. For example, your infrastructure team may have automated deployments but the main source of your quality issues could be the lack of code reviews in your development team. So identify the critical pain points and sources of delay to address those first.
    • Automation: Automate everything that can be. The lesser the dependency on human intervention, the higher are the chances for success.
    • Culture: Align the incentives and goals with your development, ITOps, SecOps, SRE teams. Ensure that they collaborate effectively and ownership in the DevOps pipeline is well established.
    • Small wins: Pick one application or team and implement your DevOps strategy within it. That way you can focus your energies and refine your experiments before applying them broadly. Show success as measured by quantifiable parameters and use that to transform the rest of your teams.
    • Organizational dynamics & integrations: Adoption of new processes and tools will cause some disruptions and you may need to re-skill part of your team or hire externally. Ensure that compliance, SecOps & audit teams are aware of your DevOps journey and get their buy-in.
    • DevOps is a continuous journey: DevOps will never be done. Train your team to learn continuously and refine your DevOps practice to keep achieving your goal: delivering software reliably and quickly.

    Micro-services

    As the amount of software in an enterprise explodes, so does the complexity. The only way to manage this complexity is by splitting your software and teams into smaller manageable units. Micro-services adoption is primarily to manage this complexity.

    Development teams across the board are choosing micro services to develop new applications and break down legacy monoliths. Every micro-service can be deployed, upgraded, scaled, monitored and restarted independent of other services. Micro-services should ideally be managed by an automated system so that teams can easily update live applications without affecting end-users.

    There are companies with 100s of micro-services in production which is only possible with mature DevOps, cloud-native and agile practice adoption.

    Interestingly, serverless platforms like Google Functions and AWS Lambda are taking the concept of micro-services to the extreme by allowing each function to act like an independent piece of the application. You can read about my thoughts on serverless computing in this blog: Serverless Computing Predictions for 2017.

    Digital Transformation

    Digital transformation involves making strategic changes to business processes, competencies, and models to leverage digital technologies. It is a very broad term and every consulting vendor twists it in various ways. Let me give a couple of examples to drive home the point that digital transformation is about using technology to improve your business model, gain efficiencies or built a moat around your business:

    • GE has done an excellent job transforming themselves from a manufacturing company into an IoT/software company with Predix. GE builds airplane engines, medical equipment, oil & gas equipment and much more. Predix is an IoT platform that is being embedded into all of GE’s products. This enabled them to charge airlines on a per-mile basis by taking the ownership of maintenance and quality instead of charging on a one-time basis. This also gives them huge amounts of data that they can leverage to improve the business as a whole. So digital innovation has enabled a business model improvement leading to higher profits.
    • Car companies are exploring models where they can provide autonomous car fleets to cities where they will charge on a per-mile basis. This will convert them into a “service” & “data” company from a pure manufacturing one.
    • Insurance companies need to built digital capabilities to acquire and retain customers. They need to build data capabilities and provide ongoing value with services rather than interact with the customer just once a year.

    You would be better placed to compete in the market if you have automation and digital process in place so that you can build new products and pivot in an agile manner.

    Big Data / Data Science

    Businesses need to deal with increasing amounts of data due to IoT, social media, mobile and due to the adoption of software for various processes. And they need to use this data intelligently. Cloud platforms provide the services and solutions to accelerate your data science and machine learning strategies. AWS, Google Cloud & open-source libraries like Tensorflow, SciPy, Keras, etc. have a broad set of machine learning and big data services that can be leveraged. Companies need to build mature data processing pipelines to aggregate data from various sources and store it for quick and efficient access to various teams. Companies are leveraging these services and libraries to build solutions like:

    • Predictive analytics
    • Cognitive computing
    • Robotic Process Automation
    • Fraud detection
    • Customer churn and segmentation analysis
    • Recommendation engines
    • Forecasting
    • Anomaly detection

    Companies are creating data science teams to build long term capabilities and moats around their business by using their data smartly.

    Re-platforming & App Modernization

    Enterprises want to modernize their legacy, often monolithic apps as they migrate to the cloud. The move can be triggered due to hardware refresh cycles or license renewals or IT cost optimization or adoption of software-focused business models.

     Benefits of modernization to customers and businesses

    Intelligent Applications

    Software is getting more intelligent and to enable this, businesses need to integrate disparate datasets, distributed teams, and processes. This is best done on a scalable global cloud platform with agile processes. Big data and data science enables the creation of intelligent applications.

    How can smart applications help your business?

    • New intelligent systems of engagement: intelligent apps surface insights to users enabling the user to be more effective and efficient. For example, CRMs and marketing software is getting intelligent and multi-platform enabling sales and marketing reps to become more productive.
    • Personalisation: E-Commerce, social networks and now B2B software is getting personalized. In order to improve user experience and reduce churn, your applications should be personalized based on the user preferences and traits.
    • Drive efficiencies: IoT is an excellent example where the efficiency of machines can be improved with data and cloud software. Real-time insights can help to optimize processes or can be used for preventive maintenance.
    • Creation of new business models: Traditional and modern industries can use AI to build new business models. For example, what if insurance companies allow you to pay insurance premiums only for the miles driven?

    Security

    Security threats to governments, enterprises and data have never been greater. As business adopt cloud native, DevOps & micro-services practices, their security practices need to evolve.

    In our experience, these are few of the features of a mature cloud native security practice:

    • Automated: Systems are updated automatically with the latest fixes. Another approach is immutable infrastructure with the adoption of containers and serverless.
    • Proactive: Automated security processes tend to be proactive. For example, if a malware of vulnerability is found in one environment, automation can fix it in all environments. Mature DevOps & CI/CD processes ensure that fixes can be deployed in hours or days instead of weeks or months.
    • Cloud Platforms: Businesses have realized that the mega-clouds are way more secure than their own data centers can be. Many of these cloud platforms have audit, security and compliance services which should be leveraged.
    • Protecting credentials: Use AWS KMS, Hashicorp Vault or other solutions for protecting keys, passwords and authorizations.
    • Bug bounties: Either setup bug bounties internally or through sites like HackerOne. You want the good guys to work for you and this is an easy way to do that.

    Conclusion

    As you can see, all of these approaches and best practices are intertwined and need to be implemented in concert to gain the desired results. It is best to start with one project, one group or one application and build on early wins. Remember, that is is a process and you are looking for gradual improvements to achieve your final objectives.

    Please let us know your thoughts and experiences by adding comments to this blog or reaching out to @kalpakshah or RSI. We would love to help your business adopt these best practices and help to build great software together. Drop me a note at kalpak (at) velotio (dot) com.