Conversational artificial intelligence company Uniphore has raised $51 million in its most recent funding round, the latest step in the firm's plans to incorporate its tech throughout the customer service sector.
"Bringing AI into the call centers is one of the biggest disruptions that we're going to see in the next three to five years in the tech space," CEO Umesh Sachdev told Cheddar.
Sachdev claimed Uniphore's AI isn't intended to target call center jobs. A short question or after-hours call could be handled by a bot, he said, while a human call could handle more complex programs.
"This is an industry which has traditionally employed millions of people. Businesses look at this as a tremendous amount of cost in servicing customers, but also a way of differentiating customer experience," said Sachdev.
"The big point I'm making is that the consumer demands and expectations are shifting to be able to reach these brands either through bots or human beings," he said. "The choice shouldn't be with the enterprise. The choice should be with the consumer."
Sachev's company is one of a growing number of tech companies selling AI systems built for customer service, which include IBM and Google.
But there's growing concern that call center jobs could be outsourced to automation and artificial intelligence. For instance, the BBC reported last year that the British retail chain Marks & Spencer had transferred customer service calls for all 640 of its stores to an artificial intelligence-based system, moving its call center staff to other roles.
Sachdev asserted that "This is one where AI will have a major impact, but not one where it's going to have an impact on people losing their jobs."
He claimed that artificial intelligence can handle repetitive tasks, but that call center workers will transition to become "knowledge workers."
"We will quickly move to a point where the human beings who work in call centers — because of their native knowledge, because of their training or time — they will become knowledge workers," he said, saying that those individuals will take on roles that train and analyze the artificial intelligence systems that call centers might use.
Joe Cecela, Dream Exchange CEO, explains how they are aiming to form the first minority-controlled company to operate an exchange in U.S. history. Watch!
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
