According to the report, "By 2025, customer service organizations that embed AI in their multichannel customer engagement platform will elevate operational efficiency by 25%." Gartner says that conversational AI, "technology is reshaping the customer experience (CX) in two ways. Firstly, some of the more routine customer touchpoints are taken over by the CAIP (conversational AI platform), freeing up human agents to engage in more value-adding activities that improve the customer outcome. Secondly, the move to a CAIP actually drives improvement in the CX."

Aside from recommendations to enterprises, the report looks at regional variations and notes, "With 43% of the deployments, EMEA is clearly embracing this technology. With 47%, the Americas is still the biggest market for VCA technologies. In APAC the market is clearly developing, with regional vendors picking up on this. The larger VCA vendors are starting to invest in APAC and expect significant growth in the next three years."

Gartner says that, "By 2021, nearly one in six customer service interactions globally will be handled by AI."

But it's not all good news for chatbots. Gartner continues, "We expect that 40% of chatbot/virtual assistant applications launched in 2018 will have been abandoned by 2020." The research firm says, "The market is awash with low-end VCAs and chatbots that deliver a poor user experience, create friction and don't deliver business benefit... Only the enterprise-grade VCAs that create a compelling user experience and deliver truly material business value will survive."

Artificial Solutions conversational AI platform, Teneo®, has been specifically designed for enterprise use. The award-wining platform allows business users and developers to collaborate on creating sophisticated, highly intelligent applications that run across 35 languages, multiple platforms and channels in record time. Used in a range of industries and applications, Teneo enables global enterprises to increase engagement, maximize revenues and receive actionable business insight.

"We're delighted to be included in Gartner's report," says Andy Peart, CMSO of Artificial Solutions. "We believe its findings very much reflect what we are seeing in the market. Teneo was specifically developed with the enterprise in mind to ensure they can easily adapt their conversational AI investment to tomorrow's needs."

Gartner, Market Guide for Virtual Customer Assistants, 11 July 2019

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