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By Randy Ksar, Uniphore
Deciding which artificial intelligence (AI) vendor to partner with can be a challenging task. The marketplace is filled with a wide range of vendors offering different capabilities and solutions, which makes it difficult to find and select the right tool for your unique requirements.
It’s therefore crucial to fully understand the AI vendor’s solution, the benefits it offers and how well it will integrate with your existing networks and systems. Here are the top five questions we suggest asking your AI vendor before you integrate their solution.
1. What capabilities does your solution provide?
Any solution you deploy needs to address an existing problem that you want to solve. When it comes to an AI product, you need to fully explore the capabilities of the vendor’s offering to ensure it solves your challenges and fits with your existing programs and systems.
For example, if you’re looking to implement a conversational AI solution, you need to ensure its features meet your requirements. Conversational AI is a set of advanced technologies that comprehend human language and use it to analyze and optimize conversations with machines across various channels. This is vital to quickly answering common customer queries and delivering an optimal user experience.
Features you need in your conversational AI solution include:
- Speech recognition
- Intent recognition
- Intelligence interaction sectioning
- Customer sentiment, emotion recognition and analysis
- Promises management, which enables the automation of call center after-call work (ACW)
- Cloud-based services
- Virtual assistant technology
[ctt template=”11″ link=”305qd” via=”yes” ]A key capability of any AI solution is the amount of time it will save your organization. So ask the AI vendor how much time it can save your employees and the types of services it can help you automate.[/ctt]
2. To function properly, which types of data does your AI need?
Any AI tool is dependent on data to increase the accuracy of its predictions. Ask the vendor what kind of data their solution needs to work effectively, how much data it requires to function, and where that data needs to be sourced from. A reputable vendor will advise if you don’t have enough or the right type of data to make their solution work for your organization.
The best AI solutions help you discover new information in addition to simply understanding the data you already have. You need to understand if the vendor will capture new data that will help you gain a competitive advantage and enable your organization to grow. It’s also important to ask the vendor how frequently they process data, which will tell you how effective they are at automating tasks.
3. Can your solution integrate with existing systems and architecture?
No matter how innovative a solution is, if it isn’t compatible with your existing architecture or systems, then it won’t be a good fit. AI solutions are rarely one-size-fits-all, so it’s crucial that a vendor has experience working with organizations like yours and in your industry. This will help you understand if their solution is well suited to your organization and prevents you from making an expensive mistake.
It’s also important to ask the vendor if the solution is cloud-based, how it integrates with existing systems, and how it’s delivered. A good AI vendor will be upfront about its delivery model and how they help you integrate the solution with your existing programs and systems.
4. What can your AI do that traditional solutions cannot?
You need to select an AI solution that offers capabilities that traditional solutions can’t compete with. This could include new and evolving models like natural language processing (NLP), which allows machines to understand human language. Other capabilities to look for include intelligent decision support, which helps you discover data insights and automate the time-consuming analysis process, and intelligent applications, which enable intelligent agent assistant and self-service.
You should ask the vendor whether it uses deep learning, which enables you to identify complex patterns and more advanced factors. It’s also important to ask how the AI vendor’s models are generated, trained and validated, which will help you understand whether the vendor can utilize AI effectively.
5. How does your solution improve over time?
Unlike many tools, AI solutions get smarter and more effective over time as they process more data. As a result, the more data you can feed an AI solution, the better it will perform and the smarter insights and predictions it can deliver.
Ask the vendor for a high-level view of how their solution evolves and how its decision-making and predictions improve over time. Also, try to discover whether the tool is reliant on humans to build templates or whether it learns and becomes more accurate based on user behavior.
Choose an AI Vendor That Meets Your Requirements
Before selecting an AI vendor, make sure that you fully understand how their solution works and how effectively it will integrate with your existing systems. In addition to the key questions outlined above, it’s also important to know how and where your data is stored, whether the vendor provides training for your employees, and the qualifications of their security and technical teams.
Connect with a Uniphore expert today to discuss how our AI solutions can solve your business challenges.