Avaya Holdings Corp. today announced further expansion of its unique A.I.Connect ecosystem with new partners and partner offers, including an increased focus on incorporating new Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities into its Unified Communications (UC) solutions. Knowmail and over.ai are the newly designated A.I.Connect partners with solutions aligned to Avaya’s overall UC and collaboration strategies. They join the broader Avaya ecosystem of companies collaborating on the use of AI and machine learning technologies for Unified Communications and Contact Center, including Verint, with whom Avaya recently expanded its partnership inclusive of additional AI-powered and Cloud solutions.
Avaya’s vision for AI in Unified Communications includes strengthening workforce productivity in four key ways:
Effortless Prioritization – enabling employees to deal with massive amounts of content such as email, IM, messages, and calls by intelligently prioritizing and responding to the most pressing items first.
Smart Communications – leveraging presence to enable “best choice first” and anticipating optimal channels for communications with peers and workgroups
Streamlined Interactions – offering timely suggestions and voice activation of communication services, simplifying manual or point-and-click interfaces required by many different communications channel choices today.
Optimized Decisions – Providing personalized visibility to complete, relevant data sets that is all too often lost from view or difficult to find.
“Avaya’s deep expertise in creating communications and collaboration experiences for enterprise workers leverages AI capabilities for natural language understanding and personal assistants. With the addition of new AI solutions from companies like Knowmail, over.ai and others, our A.I.Connect initiative continues to expand the ecosystem helping to provide optimal AI capabilities for strengthening workforce engagement across omnichannel communications,” said Eric Rossman, Avaya Vice President, Alliances and Partnerships.
“Avaya continues to aggressively position AI as a critical element of both the UC and Contact Center strategies offered to their clients,” said Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research. “Building off the long-standing success of their DevConnect Program, Avaya’s A.I.Connect initiative allows them to capitalize upon the expertise of their ecosystem for a wide range of use cases, helping enterprises establish early leadership positions through the application of analytical and predictive capabilities enabled by AI and Machine Learning capabilities.”
Founded in 2014 with the mission to liberate employees from the agony of information overload, Knowmail supports effortless prioritization by providing a highly secure, personalized AI email productivity capability to Avaya’s Unified Communications clients, offering the user a choice of visual, voice, or mixed experiences.
“We’re excited to be part of Avaya’s A.I.Connect ecosystem, and to bring the power of personalized communications to the Avaya customer base,” said Haim Senior, CEO of Knowmail. “Through our relationship, Knowmail and Avaya are capable of delivering a wholly new productivity experience, offering email prioritization by urgency, along with predicted next-best-actions to increase focus, quickly get things done, save time, and stay organized, all within the Avaya Vantage desktop smart phone. This allows professionals more focus and flexibility in their workday, completing urgent tasks even before they can boot and login to their computer in the morning.”
over.ai is an AI-enabled voice platform that tackles complex tasks by embracing natural language processing technology and allowing end users to engage naturally, to create a fundamental shift in human-computer interactions. Evolving from point-and-click to listen-and-enable interactions, over.ai will bring voice-enabled AI that streamlines communications tasks on Avaya platforms through listening, understanding and learning from its own environment in real-time.
“Enabling organizations to enhance their user experience across every channel will have an enormous impact on productivity and communication,” said Noam Fine, over.ai CEO. “We’re excited to be able to link over.ai’s Voice AI Cognitive Services with Avaya solutions and make this a reality.”
In addition, Avaya continues to deepen its overall AI and Cloud strategy for the contact center with an expanded resale agreement with existing A.I.Connect partner Verint. Through this broader arrangement, Avaya customers are now able to obtain powerful AI-enabled solutions that deliver actionable insights across text and speech channels, plus key knowledge management, feedback and online community capabilities directly through Avaya and authorized Avaya channel partners.
A.I. Connect is a consortium of companies dedicated to supporting and promoting the interoperability and value of artificial intelligence and machine learning within enterprise communications. Established by Avaya in 2017, the initiative creates a community of technology firms who can collaborate on creating the broadest set of technology options of AI capabilities for Avaya customers worldwide to deliver more engaging experiences to their own employees and end customers.
