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Malta Business Review INTERVIEW OF THE MONTH AI and Customer Service – Here to help? Interview with Pierre Mallia, Managing Director, iMovo By George Carol MBR: AI and Customer Service? Is this fiction or a reality? PM: It’s real alright, I am pretty sure that a lot of us have been using it and have just not realised that they have been interacting with AI instead of a human being. AI in customer service was estimated to be generating some $100B in value in the retail sector alone. The scope and application of AI to improve service, create new efficiencies and generate value is growing every day. MBR: What’s behind this latest venture by iMovo in the field of AI? PM: We have been focused on Customer Service technology and services since inception, some eight years ago. About three years ago we started taking a serious look at AI and how it could affect our business and whether it would help our customers. This brought about our first direct encounter with an AI called Amelia and for the first time ever, I heard another human being refer to an AI as "she". During this encounter, which was more an awakening than anything else, I could see that the opportunity was very real, and we were looking at the future of not only our business, but that of our customers. To phrase how I thought of it at the time, "it was like standing on a railway track watching an oncoming train - thinking, either get on this train or get run over by it". So, our move into this area was not just a "smart" move, it’s a necessary one. We also saw the potential positive impact that it could bring to our customers. Organisations spend a lot of money on customer service and yet customers are still frequently unhappy with the experience. Just remember the last time you called your bank or your telecom provider. What did that feel like? MBR: Who are Digital Genius? And what is the relationship with iMovo about? PM: Digital Genius is an AI platform that helps put your customer service on autopilot by understanding conversations and automating repetitive processes. The company has been around for around four years and has been invested in by leading venture capital funds including Salesforce ventures. You might have heard of chatbots, which are the latest fad in customer service - a lightweight AI that carries out chat conversations and provides answers to frequently asked questions, like "When is the next flight to Rome?" etc... DigitalGenius does a lot more than that, it will go away and do your booking if you ask it to. As a young start-up, DigitalGenius' cultures meshes well with the entrepreneurial culture at iMovo. We have a multi-faceted relationship with them, acting as an extended part of their project team as well as reselling the AI service and building intellectual property to enhance the AI platform. MBR: What is the significance behind the new partnership with Digital Genius, and what does this mean to you and iMovo? PM: Over the past few months, both companies have invested time in getting to know each other well and defining potential synergies. For iMovo, this catapults us into an exciting new area of technology and business. It brings to bear the strategy we laid out some three years ago when we set AI as a business goal. It also puts us in the forefront of the customer service industry. We have a lot of experience working with a lot of organisations in this field across several countries and we see a lot of scope of helping these organisations to innovate and move their customer service departments into the sphere of AI. It’s a massive growth opportunity and gives us a unique blend to offer the market. MBR: How does DigitalGenius help organisations and is it different from Chatbots? PM: Let me start with the second bit of your question. Chatbots are what I would term, "lightweight" AI, they allow a customer to converse and answer basic questions which are limited by pre-designed conversations and limited data sets. They are useful but Pierre Mallia, Managing Director, iMovo with Dmitry Aksenov, CEO & Founder, DigitalGenius and Chris Kellner, Head of Sales & Strategic Partnerships, DigitalGenius 12
INTERVIEW OF THE MONTH Malta Business Review Pierre Mallia only to a very limited extent. When you're dealing with possibly hundreds of calls a day, Chatbots are not able to scale. Digital Genius can do the Chatbot thing, but then its designed to also execute processes. For instance, if you call your local telecom provider and ask about your current billing, Digital Genius can answer you. Then if you decide you want an upgrade on your bandwidth, Digital Genius can be configured to handle this. In a typical Chatbot scenario, you would probably not be able to ask for your latest billing info and certainly not trigger off the provisioning of a bandwidth upgrade. This is the huge difference that Digital Genius makes in the market, it’s really quite powerful and unique and works well side by side with human customer agents. MBR: Can you tell us about iMovo's vision and what the plans are in view of the new partnership with Digital Genius? PM: Eight years ago, we set out a vision to be a thought leadership company in the field of customer relationship management and customer service management. Our vision is to continue with this journey and help our customers turn their customer service departments into sources of value generation. Our partnership with DigitalGenius will contribute to our growth strategy especially in terms of growing even further than we have internationally. During a recent meeting in London, Dmitry Aksenov, one of the founders, and I discussed how we saw each other being an essential part of our respective organisation's growth plans. When you have that kind of synchronicity at company leadership level, its proof of the potential. MBR: Will technology such as AI replace workers in the future or will it just enable workers to get the job done more efficiently? PM: There is a lot happening in the field of AI and no doubt every year the technology is getting smarter and more capable. As a personal belief I think we need to be careful how we use AI. It must be applied as a force for good - it should not be used to create further distortion in the distribution of wealth and disparity between the have and have-nots. There is a lot of debate about how to manage this aspect, including ideas like instituting an AI tax to be used to fund programmes designed to address the wealth gap I mentioned. That said, there is also the danger of an AI arms race lurking in the background. China, US and Russia are all known to have programmes to weaponize AI. This is where things could go horribly wrong. Will AI replace workers - not just yet, in many cases - at its current level and the way we see DigitalGenius in this specific case, it’s about "augmenting" people's jobs, freeing them up to do more complex tasks than the mundane repetitive. In short, I call it "amplifying the impact of your people". "There is alot happening in the field of AI and no doubt every year the technology is getting smarter and more capable. MBR: How has AI technology impacted the industry and will advances in AI technology change the workforce for the future? PM: It depends which industry you are referring to, but as a general statement AI is already impacting several industries and like the introduction of the printing press and the weaving looms hundreds of years ago, it will change the workforce. Into what and how, is something I don’t particularly feel prepared to answer. Some writers like Yuval Hariri and Martin Ford, have taken some pretty good stabs at this in their books. MBR: Where do you see the greatest opportunities for growth and what is the future direction for iMovo? PM: We are at the beginning of a new chapter in iMovo's growth with our relationship with DigitalGenius, so for the time being I'd say we're concentrating on this for now. Part of the fun of iMovo is that despite being an eight-year-old company, its culture is very much like that of a start-up and we are able to adapt to change quickly and there is an open mind. We just love to find interesting niches; I'd say we're the only company in the country which is specialised in the fields we are in like customer service. Customers like us because of this. They don’t just come to us because of the software we sell, but because they know of our deep experience in certain areas and we also advise them at times, without selling them any sort of technology. We offer expert and practical experience in seeing how AI can help their organisation, or indeed if its right for them in the first place. A lot of our customers are repeat customers or come to us by word of mouth. To me that's a clear signal that we are on the right path. Editor’s Note Pierre Mallia is a 28-year veteran of the ICT industry and has worked extensively on projects across a range of sectors including the public sector, telecommunications, software development, manufacturing, healthcare, media, retail, transport, financial services and recruitment. After a number of years working with start-ups, he then moved to Microsoft where he spent seven years as a Country Manager and established Microsoft’s subsidiary in Malta. In 2010 he founded iMovo Limited, a specialized company in the area of Customer Experience & Service Management using approaches like CRM, Business Intelligence and Workforce Management to help its customers extend and deepen their own customer relationships. Pierre is a graduate in Computer Science from Kingston University and has followed executive development programmes at the National University of Singapore and INSEAD. He has a keen interest in technology and underwater photography in his spare time. About iMovo Limited iMovo specialises in Customer Experience Management (CEM), Business Intelligence (BI) Big Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence & Workforce Management (WFM). Blending some of the most innovative technology solutions in the market with a formal advisory approach, iMovo enables organisations to build long-term value relationships with their customers resulting in consistent & profitable growth. For more info about iMovo visit: www.imovo.com.mt iMovo is a Premier Solution Provider for DigitalGenius, Planday, Qlik, Salesforce, Tableau, Talend and Zendesk. MBR Creditline: iMovo Limited www.maltabusinessreview.net 13
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