Nayan Kale, Associate Vice President with Persistent Systems, accepts the First Place Award in the Innovation category for “Humanoid Concierge Using Watson IoT” from Paul Brown, Vice President of Partner Growth, IBM United Kingdom & Ireland (UKI) at the 18th Annual IBM Broad Reach Cup Regatta Gala Awards held July 8-10, 2018 in Portsmouth, England.
Each summer, the IBM UK team hosts the Broad Reach Cup, a highly-anticipated weekend of friendly sailing competition, black tie banquets and awards presentations for IBM Business Partners and team members in the United Kingdom & Ireland (UKI) region. This year’s event brought more than 15 Business Partners to Portsmouth, England from July 8 through 10, and as a new UKI Partner for 2018, Persistent Systems was eager to compete.
Along with the awarding of the Challenge Trophy to the fastest boat and crew, the Broad Reach Cup Regatta Gala Awards gives IBM an opportunity to recognize Business Partners that rise above their peers to bring to market solutions that leverage IBM products, solutions or partners to deliver clear business results.
Persistent Systems was recognized with a First Place Award in the Innovation category for its “Humanoid Concierge Using Watson IoT”. Initially rolled out to banking customers, the humanoid concierge relies on cognitive technologies such as facial recognition, speech analysis and Watson machine learning capabilities to quickly gauge sentiment and engage customers using natural language.
The cognitive concierge can tap into a deep wiki engine to quickly return facts and information like a human representative, and it’s capable of engaging with other banking systems to handle many common banking tasks or smoothly hand off customers to human support when it’s not.
After installation at a major retail bank, the bank experienced:
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Shorter wait times
- More consistent customer service with English and Asian speakers
- Deeper engagement with younger customers
- Improved perception among bank customers and partners, as a leader in innovation
- Improved productivity of branch employees
- Stronger security through facial recognition for authorization
This is a great start to our partnership with IBM in the United Kingdom and Ireland region, said Nayan Kale, Associate Vice President with Persistent Systems. The Cognitive Concierge is a great example of the impact artificial intelligence, machine learning and the Internet of Things can have on businesses of all types when they can rely on partners like Persistent Systems that can bring these emerging technologies together to deliver a comprehensive solution.
