The Rise of AI – Experts Share Practical Sales Opportunities Across the Channel
5 Key Takeaways from Telarus’ MVP Panel at Channel Partners Conference 2023
On May 1 – 4, Telarus leadership and managers joined a record-breaking number of partners and suppliers at the annual Channel Partners Conference in Las Vegas. If you weren’t able to join us, not to worry. What happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas when it comes to sharing valuable insights.
During this year’s MVP session: “The Rise of AI,” hosted by CRO Dan Foster and featuring AI technology experts across cloud, contact center, cybersecurity, IOT, and MSPs, partners had a chance to learn about where the future is going and how partners can monetize opportunities and create efficiencies for their customers with AI today. Here are five golden takeaways:
1. New feature sets like AI-powered conversation capture are helping drive revenue for CCaaS customers.
Dan O’Connell, Chief Strategy Officer of Dialpad, encouraged partners to become familiar with new virtual agent apps that enhance the value and effectiveness of customer conversations in real time. Intelligent reminders and script prompts based on a customer’s call topic, purchase history or behavior pattern can guide an agent through more effective problem resolution, recommend promotions, and more. “With the new AI-enabled virtual agents assisting reps as they are having live conversations, they can address customer needs on the spot. So now the full knowledge base is at their fingertips, improving the experience for the customer and the rep, not to mention speeding the sales cycle and driving more ROI for that business,” said O’Connell.
2. Skeptics take heart: AI is helping workers be better at their jobs, not replace them.
For many businesses, augmenting human productivity is a key driver for investing in AI. Ashish Nagar, CEO of Level AI, an AI agent monitoring and support company, is a big fan of blending human and machine intelligence to improve call center productivity in real time and allow employees to focus on more valuable tasks. “New capabilities in AI automate mundane and repetitive tasks, hunt and organize data in seconds, and can deliver broader context for what’s going on in a conversation. This capability not only helps with objection handling and smoother customer interactions, but also on the back end so sales leaders can analyze conversations with real semantic intelligence to derive actionable insights around performance.”
Additionally, contact centers can boost customer satisfaction (CSAT) efficiencies with AI- powered apps that instantly generate ratings for each customer interaction. “Predictive analytics can now unleash CSAT scores from every call, so companies never need to send follow- up email surveys or buy additional software,” said O’Connell.
3. AIOT (Artificial Intelligence of Things) advancements are helping to make our world safer and healthier.
For IOT experts like Ken Mills, CEO of Epic IO, a perfect world is where AI adds context to sensor and device data to make more meaningful decisions that impact everyone’s safety and well-being. “Imagine if you had a person sitting in a room 24/7. What would you want them to observe and write down? That’s the basic principle for AIOT: how we can combine machine intelligence and edge computing with devices, sensors, and cameras to improve safety and experience.”
Mills cited tremendous opportunities in the healthcare space. For example, healthcare facilities with remote patient monitoring (RPM) can improve patient outcomes via AI-enabled cameras that trigger alerts of a patient falling out of bed and the patient’s state. These insights could help resource-stretched nurses optimize decision-making. Mills is also seeing a lot of growth in smart city planning. “Smart cities are increasingly using AI tools to look at traffic patterns to inform design decisions and adapt roads faster than ever before. And at the same time integrating sensor data to identify sources of air pollution, which in turn helps shape policies for improved air quality.”
4. The war on evolving cyber threats is on; new AI engines can help your customers keep pace.
Michael Sci, Channel Solutions Architect at eSentire, an MDR provider, likened cybersecurity to a data tsunami. “With the growth of insider threats like malware attacks, customers are overwhelmed by all the data and how to make sense of it. Our cloud-based AI engine is becoming really good at applying behavior analytics to detect disruptors, funneling down that sophisticated data and making it actionable for a threat hunter.” However, Sci cautions that the human element is still essential. “AI is fantastic, but it’s still abstract thinking. You can combine tech to make quick decisions, but you still need human intuition as well.”
5. The bottom line: AI is no longer hype – now’s the time to explore opportunities to advance your business and stay competitive.
Today’s real AI applications allow partners to expand their wallet share by breaking out of their silos and selling into other lines of business. “AI is business critical for customers, and they are going to look at who can bring value across multiple areas of their company,” said Ben Paluba, SVP of Professional Services at RapidScale/LogicWorks. “Chances are the AI initiatives come from a completely different budget than the existing products you sell to them, so you don’t have to worry about splitting your dollar different ways.”
Telarus partners will have a chance to learn more about the latest in AI and other solutions, tools, and services to advance their business at our Partner Summit event hosted in Grapevine, Texas, July 31 – August 2, 2023. To learn more and register, visit www.telarus.com/events/partner-summit.