Guide

Customer Service
& Artificial
Intelligence:
A Roadmap of Value

www.digitalgenius.com
 Artificial Intelligence
In Human Communication
In January 1984, Steve Jobs of Apple was
presenting at a keynote event. On stage, he
took their newest personal computer out of
a bag. Seconds later, in a tinny robotic voice,
the computer said, “Hello, I am Macintosh. It
sure is great to get out of that bag.”
“Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is
great to get out of that bag.”
It was the first time most people present
had heard a computer speak, and Apple’s
demo became the industry’s first brush with
a real-life, natural language user-interface in
commercial software.
Thirty-three years later, in 2018, a newer
company - Google - emerged with another
keynote demo. It showcased their Google
Duplex voice software interacting with
unwitting humans to reserve restaurant
tables and book hair appointments. Similar
to Apple’s demo, most people had never
experienced such a seamless interaction
between humans and a natural language
user-interface.
What Apple’s demo told the world was of the
possibilities of a new consumer technology.
What Google’s demo exposed was that this
technology is now ready to communicate
with us in natural language. Of course,
widely used products like Alexa and Google
Home have already confirmed this in the
commercial market.
To some, it might seem like the barriers to
truly intelligent software have fallen, and that
general artificial intelligence is now a reality.
It is easy to get carried away with the news-
cycle. But those of us working at the cutting
edge of the technology know that very
important problems remain to be solved.
There are things AI can do today, and there
are things it still cannot.
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What AI Can Do
To understand what problems in natural language software are solved and commercially
viable today, two concepts are useful:

• Natural language user-interface (NLUI)

• Natural language reasoning (NLR)

A natural language user-interface is any UI component that allows people to interact with
computer software via natural language. This might be written language, spoken language,
or signed language. For example, a computer programme that transcribes spoken words to
text, or gives voice to written words, could be used as components in an NLUI.

Most of the hard problems of NLUI have been solved. Voice-to-text, text-to-voice, and text-
to-text (e.g. translation) software have achieved human or near-human competence in the
last decade. When layered on top of rules-based software, NLUIs are now commercially
successful and scalable.

What AI Can’t Do
On the other hand, natural language reasoning is
the ability to draw meaning from, reason with, or
derive new knowledge or information from human
language. For example, a piece of software that
takes news articles as inputs, and outputs fresh
documents drawing conclusions about news events,
would be doing so by reasoning with natural
language.
It is important to note is that although the hard
problems of NLUIs are generally solved, many
problems in NLR have a long way to go. Some NLR is
commercially scalable, such as sentiment prediction
or simple question-answering. But we do not yet
know how to train machine learning software to
reason with natural language with anything more
than minimal complexity.
Where This Leaves Us
For these reasons, at
DigitalGenius, we have learned
to harness the best of both these
paradigms. Years of experience
have taught us what machine
learning can do for us in the real
world and what it cannot. We have
learned to use the best available
solutions in NLR with cutting edge
NLUIs to automate repetitive
human problems in the real world.
This approach is at the core of the
promise of value our technology
creates for our customers.

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 Artificial Intelligence
at DigitalGenius

Our History with Artificial Intelligence

Our first experience in building artificial intelligence at DigitalGenius was with scripted and
rules-based chatbots, as far back as 2013. We deployed these systems to multinational
clients, including HSBC and Coca Cola. But we soon learned that the future of NLUI and NLR
software would involve machine learning, and this is what we turned to.

We went to machine learning conferences around the world and met some of the biggest
names in the field - people like Jurgen Schmidhuber, David Silver and Andrew Ng. We
looked to UCL, Cambridge and Imperial College to hire some of the best machine learning
and computational linguistics talent available. We communicated with the developers of
leading deep learning libraries like Tensorflow, Keras and Pytorch, sometimes making our
own contributions to these.

And all this brought us to where we are today: a veteran start-up in the automation industry,
with an obsession with and expertise in a single, focused problem: how to automatically
solve customer tickets in the customer support industry.

An obsession with and

expertise in a single, focused
problem: how to automatically
solve customer tickets in the
customer support industry.

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 Our Approach to AI for Customer Support
Our product lines are broken into two central use cases: CoPilot and AutoPilot.

CoPilot:
Helping Customer Support Work Smarter

Our CoPilot product aims to help customer service

professionals work faster, smarter and more enjoyably.
We automatically import trawls of historical data from
contact center logs. Then we train our neural networks
to predict fields, tags, language used, and other forms
of metadata.

We also rank repetitive customer messages with a

smart neural search engine that matches customer
queries to canned FAQ responses.
Over time, as we collect more data
“We train our neural networks to
from agent users, we begin to
predict fields, tags, language used,
automate these responses, deflecting
tickets, imitating the past behavior of and other forms of metadata”
human agents.

AutoPilot:
Full End-to-End Ticket Resolution

Our AutoPilot product aims to automate all aspects

of customer service ticket resolution. We connect our
clients’ CRM environment to a mixture of curated AI
models, decision tree flows, and external APIs to guide
end-users through the most repetitive queries. We
aim to automate large fractions of our clients’ ticket
base, leaving agents free to resolve the more complex,
nuanced issues that arrive at their desk.

These product lines are the result of years of research

and development from our engineering and machine
learning teams. There were things learned along the
way that you can only discover by experiencing them.

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Our Philosophy
That journey also helped us develop a core set of research and development principles
when improving and expanding our offering. Our engineering philosophy is based on a few
guiding principles:

Industrial-Grade NLUIs
The best tools in the market for stepping between the natural language of users and the logical
components of our software stack.

NLR Where It’s Needed, and Where It Works

We use natural language-reasoning technologies where they work and add value. Deep learning
is great where simple reasoning is needed: what is the intent of the user? Is their mood positive or
negative? What language are they using? What new data do we need from them? For everything else,
rules-based procedures can add more value and scale more reliably.

Data is Paramount
Machine learning programs learn the data they are fed indiscriminately, but the automation industry is
far from reaching an AI-friendly standard in data storage and presentation. At DigitalGenius we treat
data curation, preparation and monitoring as a fundamental piece in our product pipeline.

Talent is Non-Negotiable
To stay on the cutting edge, we need people at the cutting edge. At DigitalGenius, we aspire to hire
the hungriest and brightest engineers in the field of machine learning.

No Divide Between AI Research and Development

We decided early on to merge the research and production AI teams. We found separating them (as
many in the industry do) makes little sense - conducting research without considering development
means few projects make it into the real world. All our AI engineers rotate on projects, sometimes
working on green-field research, at other times working with customers to diagnose issues with their
models. Everyone on the team now has a wider understanding of our platform, and this informs how
we strategize for the future and identify relevant research projects.

“At DigitalGenius, we treat data

curation, preparation and monitoring as a
fundamental piece in our product pipeline.”

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Where We’re Going
We have used the best data management technology, our market-leading access to machine
learning talent, and our years of experience to build the best customer service ticket
automation product. It’s producing real value for our customers every day.

Yet we also have our eyes on the future. As we become better at building software that can
reason with language in complex ways, new innovations will become ready for commercial
scaling, and those with the deepest understanding of them will be positioned to lead. So
our artificial intelligence engineers are always reviewing and monitoring the latest deep
learning research, attending conferences (sometimes publishing in them too), to make sure
DigitalGenius stays at the front-line of the customer service automation industry.

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 Scaling Artificial Intelligence
In Production

We Were First
We have been doing this for longer than most in the industry, and we have a history of
arriving at key innovations before, or alongside, the broader market. Many of the larger
tech companies (Google, Facebook etc.) have a large budget to publish and promote
their technologies. In many cases, we have seen our in-house research repeated by these
companies. Key discoveries include:

Scaling Deep Learning in Production

In the last few years, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft have worked on cloud platforms for
scaling machine learning models in production. Before all this, at DigitalGenius we built and scaled a
platform for training, monitoring and serving deep learning models in the cloud.

Developing Our Fast Training and Inference System

A few years ago, deep learning models were seen as having huge potential, but the amount of
time and compute needed to train and store many of its architectures made it difficult to scale. Our
engineers spent a long time optimizing our software and practices to make deep learning viable in
live production systems. Some of our discoveries and innovations were repeated later in Facebook
Research’s Fasttext system.

Beating IBM Watson

IBM Watson is at the forefront of the AI industry, but in the niche of customer service and simple
question-answering, we have proven our mettle. We took one of IBM’s published benchmarks, where
they had state-of-the-art results in an academic question-answering problem - and we beat their results
with our own technology.

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An Overview of Our System
There are three broad areas our production pipeline focuses on:

• Dataset Curation and Storage

• Model Training
• Model Inference

Dataset Curation and Storage

When things go wrong with automation in customer service, it is often because technology
users have lost oversight of the datasets their models are learning from. We treat dataset
analysis and curation as an integral part of our product. We help our customers understand
their data from the point of view of ticket automation, and help them build automation-
optimized data models for value creation in the real world.

Model Training
We have a production-ready platform for
training and monitoring deep-learning
models. In 2017, it was home to about 100
neural network models; today that number is
closer to 800, and growing.

Our machine learning engineers use this

platform as a basis to build skills. We have
dedicated neural network architectures
for selecting answers to customer queries,
for predicting field values, for predicting
the language of a customer query, and for
predicting the resolution time of a case. We
have built our system to make it easy and scalable for our artificial intelligence engineers to
add new skills to the repertoire as they appear on our product roadmap.

Model Inference
Inference is the process of getting new predictions from live models. All our models in
production are serving predictions in real-time to customer service agents and users all over
the world. We continuously monitor the latency of our software to iterate the experience
of our users. We issue real-time predictions with an average latency of 0.37ms, significantly
faster than other NLUI products such as Amazon Lex and Google Home.

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The Value We Create

All this work has allowed us to globally scale value into the customer service industry. We are
producing tens of gigabytes of customer service metadata that was previously the product
of human labor. We are predicting the likely resolution time of new customer service tickets,
allowing human agents to prioritize their work. We are saving hundreds of hours of people’s
time by making their processes quicker via our machine learning products. And we are
automatically solving tens of thousands of customer tickets throughout the world, in
twenty different languages. We are at the forefront of a technological paradigm shift that is
reshaping the global labor force, releasing new value into people’s lives.

Yet our ambition doesn’t stop there. We believe that any industry involving human
communication will be transformed by artificial intelligence. We want to play a key role in
those transformations.

To do so, we will continue to maintain our veterancy, expertise and passion for artificial
intelligence technology. We want to carry on the journey that Apple started with their demo
in 1984. And on the way, we will delight in the moments of discovery and magic that artificial
intelligence increasingly creates in the world.

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About DigitalGenius
DigitalGenius is the AI platform that puts your customer support on autopilot by
understanding conversations, automating repetitive processes and delighting your
customers. The platform is powered by deep learning that understands your customers’
objectives, then drives automated resolutions through APIs that connect seamlessly to your
own backend systems. This is the practical application of AI that delivers the concrete ROI
you’ve been waiting for.

The DigitalGenius AI platform is used by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, The Perfume Shop, Air
France and other forward-looking businesses to drive conversational process automation
through the use of deep learning. Learn more about how it works at digitalgenius.com.

UK 1 Canada Square, London, UK | +44 208 242 1943

US 180 Sansome St., San Francisco, CA 94104 | +1 415 500 9877
www.digitalgenius.com
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