Florida-based conversational AI platform, Kore.ai has raised $70m and aims to position itself as the ‘undisputed leader’ in customer experience optimisation.
We recently published a list of conversational AI companies that had received funding so far in 2021, and it’s pretty extensive. In recent months, both Balto and Kore.ai have secured further funding, which is a great display of confidence from investors in the conversational AI market.
Kore.ai plans to use the funding to invest in its workforce, skills and to expand its already growing product offering and to establish itself as the ‘undisputed leader’ in customer experience optimisation after being ranked in the top 5 top conversational AI platforms by Gartner.
Note the language here; ‘customer experience optimisation’, not ‘conversational AI’. You see, Kore.ai is beginning to position itself as a customer experience optimisation platform, as opposed to a ‘conversational AI’ platform; a term most other in vendors this space use.
When you’re nostril-deep into a specific industry or technology, it’s easy to have your vocabulary, and therefore your customer-facing language, shaped by your day-to-day. You overlook that certain terms and vernaculars means little to everyday people who don’t live and breathe the technology. The term ‘conversational AI’ may well be growing in its understanding and use, but it’s not as easily understood by, say, the average marketing or customer service manager.
‘Customer experience’, on the other hand, is widely understood. Reframing the solution as a customer experience optimisation platform is a way of at least speaking the same language as your customer and is a smart move from Kore.ai; one that others will surely follow in time.
It’s hard to see a customer experience strategy in this day and age that isn’t in some way reliant on heavy usage of automation and AI-based technologies; NLP being a fundamental enabler of that. And that’s the point; the conversational AI parts are simply enablers of outcomes. The outcome being improved customer experience. It’s a means to an end, not the end in and of itself.
This shows that the ‘conversational AI’ field is maturing and finding better ways of communicating the value it can bring to businesses and customers, which is great to see.
