Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) are Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered conversational bots that have potential to offer high value in various business functions such as contact center, F&A, HR, and IT & helpdesk through superior customer satisfaction, round the clock support, and reduction in service costs for the enterprises. Realizing these benefits, many enterprises, vendors, and service providers are investing in this area. However, IVA is a burgeoning market with advanced and sophisticated cognitive technologies that are still relatively unknown to many potential buyers in terms of solution features, deployment models, supporting frameworks, and commercial aspects. The technologies are also evolving with an expanding feature set and increasing richness of functionality. With a rewarding business opportunity and a huge market potential, multiple vendors are looking at building competitive solutions to compete in the market.

Scope of analysis

• Coverage across over 10 IVA technology vendors including Aivo, Creative Virtual, Edgeverve, HCL, IBM Watson, Inbenta, IPSoft, Konverso, Kore.ai, and [24]7.ai
• Global surveys and one-on-one executive-level buyer interviews to understand how organizations perceive their IVA engagements

Content

This report is meant to provide IVA buyers, IVA technology vendors, and third-party enablers (for e.g. service providers) a detailed view of the current state of the market. As part of this, the current report provides insights into key developments in the IVA market, adoption trends by geographies, industries & business functions, solution characteristics, vendor landscape overview, and future outlook for 2019-2020.

Some of the findings are:

• In the last 12-18 months, the market has witnessed a gradual shift from rule-based solutions to AI-driven IVA solutions
• Driven by success from RPA implementations, enterprises are becoming more receptive to automation solutions, which in turn is fuelling interest in the IVA solutions
• BFSI is the biggest adopter of IVA solutions, with focus on improving customer experience and saving costs; telecom, technology, and manufacturing are the other major adopters
• IVA solutions are offered as off-the-shelf solutions, platform-as-a-service, or software-as-a-service, depending on the requirements of the enterprises
• A majority of the vendors leverage a usage-based pricing model, wherein clients are charged based on the number of interactions or some derivatives, thereof. They also charge a one-time implementation fee and an annual maintenance fee
• The IVA vendor landscape consists of AI/NLP companies, technology companies, and service providers

Membership(s)

Customer Experience Management (CXM) Services, including Contact Center Outsourcing

Service Optimization Technologies (SOT)