Meet Amelia, the AI Platform That Could Change the Future of IT
Her name is Amelia, and she is the complete package: smart, sophisticated, industrious and loyal. No wonder her boss, Chetan Dube, can’t get her out of his head.
“My wife is convinced I’m having an affair with Amelia,” Dube says, leaning forward conspiratorially. “I have a great deal of passion and infatuation with her.”
He’s not alone. Amelia beguiles everyone she meets, and those in the know can’t stop buzzing about her. The blue-eyed blonde’s star is rising so fast that if she were a Hollywood ingénue or fashion model, the tabloids would proclaim her an “It” girl, but the tag doesn’t really apply. Amelia is more of an IT girl, you see. In fact, she’s all IT.
Amelia is an artificial intelligence platform created by Dube’s managed IT services firm IPsoft, a virtual agent avatar poised to redefine how enterprises operate by automating and enhancing a wide range of business processes. The product of an obsessive and still-ongoing 16-year developmental cycle, she—yes, everyone at IPsoft speaks about Amelia using feminine pronouns—leverages cognitive technologies to interface with consumers and colleagues in astoundingly human terms, parsing questions, analyzing intent and even sensing emotions to resolve issues more efficiently and effectively than flesh-and-blood customer service representatives.
Install Amelia in a call center, for example, and her patent-pending intelligence algorithms absorb in a matter of seconds the same instruction manuals and guidelines that human staffers spend weeks or even months memorizing. Instead of simply recognizing individual words, Amelia grasps the deeper implications of what she reads, applying logic and making connections between concepts. She relies on that baseline information to reply to customer email and answer phone calls; if she understands the query, she executes the steps necessary to resolve the issue, and if she doesn’t know the answer, she scans the web or the corporate intranet for clues. Only when Amelia cannot locate the relevant information does she escalate the case to a human expert, observing the response and filing it away for
