Executive Briefing: 2019 chatbot predictions

Yi Zhang (Rulai | University of California, Santa Cruz)

1:45pm–2:25pm Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Location: LL21 A/B

AI Business Summit, Executive Briefing/Best Practices

Secondary topics: Design, Interfaces, and UX, Machine Learning, Text, Language, and Speech

Average rating:

(4.43, 7 ratings)

Level

Beginner

We live in an instant gratification economy. Consumers want everything now, at their fingertips, with very little effort. To meet these demands and compete on the market, companies need to fundamentally rethink how they operate. AI conversational systems that facilitate human-centered automation will be the secret weapon of successful companies. They’ll adapt to customers and employees (instead of the reverse), making employees much more productive while delivering a faster, more personalized experience for consumers.

Yi Zhang explores some predictions on how the technology will evolve from its current state in 2019. She clarifies some common misunderstandings of the technologies and presents case studies in several industries (ride-hailing, pharmaceutical, etc.) for illustration.

What you'll learn

Learn about dumb chatbots versus smart chatbots and how conversational computing will emerge as the next frontier in smart automation
Understand that business leads will and should increasingly take ownership of chatbot deployment and that bots can be deployed with less training data than ever before
Find out why companies will and should begin to carefully design the personality of their virtual assistants in order to make them more likable and natural

Yi Zhang

Rulai | University of California, Santa Cruz

Yi Zhang is the CTO of Rulai and a tenured professor in the computer science and engineering department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Previously, she was a consultant or technical adviser for enterprises (HP, Toyota, Alibaba, etc.) and startups. She has more than 20 years of experience in AI with various awards, including ACM SIGIR Best Paper Award, National Science Foundation Faculty Career Award, Google Research Award, and Microsoft Research Award. She’s served as program chair, area chair, and PC member for various top-tier international conferences. She received her PhD from the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science.