EBO Virtual Assistant

ALEXANDROS A. PATSALIDES

Director - Financial Services Division alex.patsalides@ebo.ai www.ebo.ai/industries/financial-services

Q How have you avoided it not just becoming another brand that uses AI as a buzzword to get attention?

There’s a lot of AI hype which unfortunately ‘hides’ the real discussions we should be having around business benefits, or the tough questions we need to discuss about AI bias, ethics and human agency. Hype shifts the discussion away from AI literacy to marketingspeak, which is deplorable.

EBO has consistently focused on ensuring that AI engenders trust and have wide societal acceptance. For this to occur we take time to explain key AI concepts (like classification and confidence levels, ethics and fairness in machine learning), for our nontechnical audiences. And we do this in simple terms to allow anyone to follow. EBO has developed through Machine Learning, one of the most advanced Virtual Agent models in the world. At the same time, we’ve worked with large enterprise to understand their challenges and tailor our products to a range of business requirements.

Today our Virtual Agents understand what your customers are saying but inform you about the context of what they’re not saying. This is an incredible differentiator and removes the frustration often experienced with ‘dumb’ solutions that cannot infer meaning. Therefore, EBO enables seamless end to end journeys that deliver better onboarding, retention and re-engagement.

Q How do you teach your software to understand the needs of a new client?

We get attention because the technology we build is pioneering and world-leading, but most importantly it makes complete business sense.

Q Does this help every owner of an online brand achieve full automation in their support department?

Yes. We allow Customer Service personnel to focus on the complex, while our Virtual Agents handle the repetitive.

EBO works to make a real impact, that can be seen in the every-day running of a business. This isn’t about ‘digital transformations’ or new world trends that claim to revolutionize the future. It’s about today’s business problems.

Q I have been stuck in support bot hell several times. How is your product different, and can it take away this frustration?

We know that businesses have lots of problems, but they also have lots to work with. We work closely with clients to integrate with what they’ve got - making use of their existing systems, processes, data and customer knowledge to improve customer interactions.

The great thing about AI today is that it is more ‘intelligent’ than ‘artificial’ and therefore it allows us to train our Virtual Agents from a very small dataset. Once launched, a Virtual Agent is continuously learning how to better perform tasks accurately and efficiently.

Q How hard is it to integrate to your existing software?

EBO’s solution is interoperable – it integrates well with existing platforms in the industry, making the roll-out painless. Most IT projects are still too complex for today’s fast-moving world. CTOs rarely

have capacity to deliver all the projects necessary for the business so EBO is built to make the CTOs decision to choose us – easy.

More so, because EBO is close to the industry it is pre-integrated with most existing software used in our main sectors. In the financial services sector, we are completely interoperable with the main products in use whether it’s a Microsoft solution, a CRM product like Salesforce or ZenDesk, ERPs of other backoffice solutions.

Q How close are we to having a support system that has equal knowledge that of a human?

AI is ‘intelligent’ in pure, algorithmic computational sense. Yet despite the increased level of intelligence and autonomy, the hypothetical claim that AI can attain capabilities such as human consciousness (although definitions of ‘consciousness’ vary) is presently unfounded.

Pure intelligence (thinking about thinking) has subjective, first-person causal powers and is not inherently computational the way computer programs are. The human mind has a number of intrinsic characteristics, such as subjectivity, intentionality, teleology and rationality, which a computer can only simulate.

Alexandros A. Patsalides Director - Financial Services Division at EBO

Subsequently machines do not have access to the metaphysical nature of reality. Mirroring reason is not the same as reasoning. And reasoning is not the same thing as consciousness.

Therefore at EBO we like to think that we must carefully examine which processes should be automated via AI and which should remain 100% human.

Q Do you think this will make humans irrelevant in a support department over the next few years?

Most of what we do at EBO presents an opportunity to augment tasks done by humans. Thus we augment and not replace human agency. Nevertheless, it is likely that some jobs will go whilst others will be created. The traditional support department function will change and the repetitive, mundane tasks will (and already are – through EBO) being moved to AI.

It’s also interesting to note that the World Economic Forum predicts that by 2025 a total of 97m jobs will be created, with Data Analysts & Scientists & #AI and #MachineLearning Specialists leading, while 85m jobs will be lost, with ‘Data Entry Clerks & Administrative & Secretaries’ the most impacted. The net gain is to be noted as it is indicative of a new vibrant economy with new role requirements.