Author Archives: Zeus Kerravala

Artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way in the past few years.  What was once something only witnessed in science fiction has now become very real with AIs playing poker, telling us when to leave for the airport and letting us know what the weather will be like tomorrow.  In the business world, AI has been used to improve cybersecurity and help contact center agents be smarter but it has yet to do is make workers more productive in any significant way but that will change soon.  

This week in San Francisco, collaboration market leader, Cisco, held an Advanced Technology Fair to look at what happens when AI and collaboration are brought together.  Instead of issuing a press release, Cisco chose to show what was possible through a series of demos.  I was fortunate to be at the event and wanted to share what happens when AI is applied to meetings. 

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Earlier this year, Nvidia unveiled its Holodeck. The product is a virtual world in which all of the laws of physics apply, so images cast shadows, objects experience gravity and objects act as they should.

If you’re a Trekkie like me, you’re likely familiar with the Holodeck on the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation. There is one significant difference between the Star Trek Holodeck and Nvidia’s. In the TV show, the crew often used the virtual world to get away from their jobs, whereas Nvidia created its Holodeck to help people do their jobs better.

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It seems like the use cases for artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded over the past few years.  I’ve seen many consumer examples like an AI writing news stories, playing poker and Go.  However, AI has yet to make a significant dent in the business world. 

Last week, Talkdesk announced it has integrated AI into its platform, but not for what one might think.  Given that Talkdesk is one of the leading cloud contact center vendors, one would expect it was using AI to make contact centers better — and it can do that — but this specific release is focused on inside sales.

“Talkdesk for Sales” uses AI to help inside sales people have more productive conversations with prospects. The product is currently in beta but will be on display at this week’s Salesforce Dreamforce.  Talkdesk for sales is built on the following AI-powered features.

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Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the world around us faster than ever before. We’re closer to having cars that drive themselves, natural language processing and computers that play chess with Grand Masters. As widespread as AI and machine learning have been, they have yet to impact corporate IT in any significant way. 

Recently, the IT service management firm ServiceNow conducted a survey of over 500 CIOs in 11 countries and 25 industries about the state of AI in corporate IT — The Global CIO Point of View (pdf). To gain an understanding of the data collected and what it means, I recently talked with Dave Wright, chief innovation officer of ServiceNow.

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Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, is best known for its outstanding business-grade Wi-Fi products. What’s less well known about Aruba is that it has always had excellent security products. In fact, I’ve often described the company as a security vendor dressed up as a Wi-Fi vendor, as Aruba and security have gone hand in hand like the New England Patriots and winning. 

However, Aruba’s security positioning has always been tactical rather than strategic because its products were used for specific purposes, such as end point protection or wireless security. That shifted this week at APAC Atmosphere in Macau when the company introduced its 360 Security Fabric, which enables it to provide end-to-end security to address the needs of a world that is becoming increasingly digitized. 

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Over the past few years Cisco has changed the face of its security business. What was once a struggling concern is now the fastest-growing part of Cisco. How did the company do this? Part of the rebirth of Cisco security can be traced to a change in focus, away from point products to a more data-driven model. Big data, analytics and machine learning have been hot topics in IT, and Cisco has gotten religion in this area and applied it masterfully to its security business.

Today, Cisco added to that when it announced its intent to acquire privately held Observable Networks. The St. Louis-based company provides dynamic network behavior monitoring to help security teams find anomalies that could indicate a breach. The product captures data and analyzes it to gain situational awareness of all users, devices and traffic, not only on a company’s network, but also out to the cloud, with support for both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

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