Pegasystems Adds Advanced AI Capabilities to CRM Applications

There’s no doubt at this point that organizations will soon be taking advantage of all sorts of advanced algorithms with a broad range of applications that will collectively make up a new intelligent enterprise. The only real issue is how they will manifest themselves.

Pegasystems today announced it has infused the Pega Customer Service and Pega Sales Automation applications that make up its customer relationship management (CRM) suite of offerings with machine learning algorithms and robotic processing capabilities that can be invoked via the cloud.

Don Schuerman, CTO and vice president of product marketing for Pegasystems, says the biggest issue many organizations are wrestling with as far as various forms of artificial intelligence (AI) applications are concerned is figuring out where to start. By adding these capabilities within an application that is focused on a specific set of business processes, Schuerman says, it becomes possible to leverage AI to provide an immediate impact for the business.

“It doesn’t have to be a Big Data science project,” says Schuerman.

The additions are based on technologies that Pegasystems gained when it acquired OpenSpan last year, and Schuerman says Pegasystems is enabling organizations to take a two-phased approach to AI. The first involves using machine learning algorithms to identify inefficiencies associated with, for example, the length of time being spent per customer. The second phase gives organizations the option to apply robotic processing to fix it or simply coach the individuals involved to achieve a better outcome.

Longer term, it’s unclear to what degree AI technologies will drive convergence across types of enterprise applications. But certainly, most organizations are about to have a much deeper understanding of how their processes work than ever before.