Winning Skillsets for Conversational AI

• 0:00 - 0:31

Thanks. Good evening and good morning and good afternoon Botrepreneurs,, being back on air, uh, the idea was to go live for the first time on LinkedIn as well, but there was a big technical hiccup there, but nevertheless, we've got to make it a great show for you guys. Yeah, we have, uh, we have hunkered down with us from the conversation design Institute also answers to them.

• 0:31 - 0:39

So, uh, yeah, I think we are, I don't up 10 kilometers apart or 1590. I'm interested in, so I'm still thinking.

• 0:42 - 0:44

I'm there. I'm still, yeah. Yeah.

• 0:46 - 1:16

So before I hand the mic to you, I have some household, uh, messages. Um, first of all, I think we can split group in, uh, maybe into two to touch with people, the ones that are just making the transition to conversational AI and bots, foreigners who are busy with it for quite some time already and want to, uh, their grades, their, their play.

• 1:18 - 1:33

Um, so if you've been, yeah, you can, the comments on Facebook, uh, if you are new or not, then we would be very thankful until it's so nice if you, us, where you're watching from which country.

• 1:35 - 1:38

And what do you want from the session. Whereas no,.

• 1:39 - 2:06

Exactly. That is not what we want to answer. As many questions live as possible. I also prepare to list as a backup. Okay. You guys going on, um, and last but not least a sort of giveaway at the end of the show, it's about the online courses, because I already gave the discount code for that, uh, stay with us. Uh,.

• 2:07 - 2:08

I see what you mean.

• 2:11 - 2:29

Um, approve some more membership requests. Um, yeah, I'll get back to you and let's start at the beginning out that your journey in conversational AI started.

• 2:30 - 3:06

The journey and conversational. Yeah. I liked, uh, the word AI there, cause it took us a while to figure out like that was that I was even in AI, but, uh, I, I always thought like when I was studying, I was doing like European history and European literature and I wanted to be a writer and uh, and then I wrote manuscripts and the professors were like, oh, that's not very good. So maybe you go do something else. So I became a copywriter and I worked at a startup incubator here and I, so I learned a bit about technology and I learned about entrepreneurship, which was fun.

• 3:06 - 3:24

And I was part of like a video streaming, uh, startup, which failed miserably. Um, and so I got a job in customer service and I was working for KLM there in Amsterdam. And we were on social media, uh, helping like stranded travelers, find their luggage around the world.

• 3:25 - 4:00

And so I was in customer service and then people start automating customer service. And I joined a company called CX company. That's now part of cm, um, learn more about chatbots and, um, like it became more conversational because they used to be these virtual assistants. So I could ask a question and they wouldn't know the answer. Um, and it became more of a conversation then I figured, oh wait, I, I liked to write and I know how to write dialogue. Uh, I understand some of the technology, cause I worked at T incubator. I understand the customer service space, so I could probably like figure this out.

• 4:01 - 4:13

So I started working on that and trying to solve that problem a little bit. And I figured like all these tech companies, they just want to sell technology and these enterprises, they don't really know what to do.

• 4:13 - 5:03

So I figured if we focus on actually solving a problem with the design that we're in good shape. And the way I sort of saw is that everybody's selling hammers and we were the carpenters, but I didn't really think that like, I didn't know it was AI and that I was thinking invited to, to conference in London CargoX, which is a great faster as the festival actually, uh, highly recommend anyone going there. But all of a sudden I was part of an AI panel. I was like, and I was just like a writer writing, dialogues and writing stuff or, uh, or chatbots the word AI had not really crossed my mind yet that all of a sudden, like we, we heard it was particularly to people that knew a lot about AI that saw the value that we were delivering so that it's like, oh wait, that's interesting.

• 5:03 - 5:33

So apparently we're bringing something to the AI space that is needed. And that's kind of how we started, started slowly, already. We had a company called robocopy, which very much an agency then Emily started training people, uh, in conversation design. And then eventually that was, got a lot of traction. We rebranded to conversation design Institute. Um, and now we have both like a training side of the business and the consulting side.

• 5:34 - 5:39

Cool. Yeah. I, I did the first ranking. I think you guys put on line with fire robocopy.

• 5:40 - 5:42

Oh really? That's a long time. Yeah.

• 5:42 - 5:47

I liked the, uh, the robot, the voice at the end of each chapter.

• 5:48 - 5:50

Ah, congregation of academy. Yeah.

• 5:52 - 6:32

I find nerd, but that's not what you're here for tonight. We have a lot of comments coming in, so we have new and uh, people who understand Canada. So that's great India in the middle of the night. Thanks so much. Yeah. Uh, Englishman and Belgrade. Okay, cool guys. Very cool. Um, yeah. Do you think we can make another, the vision? Uh, so you have to work to make sure the book says the right thing and you have to work to make sure but understands what the user needs.

• 6:32 - 6:39

Uh, you agree on that split then? How do you manage that in the trainings?

• 6:40 - 7:15

Yeah. So, so for us in general, like our whole philosophy was that if you have an artificial brain talk to human brain, that you want to understand technology, you want to understand psychology and that needs to be equally important. So we have three certificates. Um, so there's the AI trainer. That person turns data into understanding. This is the person that's trying to align, which models this person is in charge of understanding what people say, um, and implemented into technology. And then you have to conversation designers that make sure that people feel understood, right.

• 7:15 - 7:34

Uh, don't make sure that we have a human centric approach approach to communication to designing these assistants. But what we noticed. So we had those two rules and now we added like the third, which is the conversational copywriter, which is a bit more, it's a stronger writing. It's more about personality.

• 7:34 - 8:11

It's more about behavior design. Uh, it's often like the most senior copywriter on the team because some of the people that are doing the conversations are designed to think more about the structure of the conversation and the information, how you're presenting that they sometimes miss like the final touch of the copywriting. So we have that as a separate ticket. Now it's sometimes it's often, you know, one person, two certificates, but it's definitely a different skill set is required. And I won't even most teams by the ratio is like three AI trainers, two compensation designers and one copywriter.

• 8:11 - 8:22

So if you've got sort of done, it's, you know, three people focusing on human, three people focusing on the AI. So it's like equally, it's not it's neatly.

• 8:23 - 8:55

Yeah. And I think companies are all in their own, uh, uh, drunk in the journey. Some are years ahead of others. Um, and you see companies compare new teams and people do, uh, can spend 50% of their time on, on conversational and then scaled it up. Um, do you, do you also see that and do you think the pandemic to boost to the, uh, ecosystem are,.

• 8:56 - 9:31

Well, you're saying a lot though. That's okay. Let's break it up. So I think there's companies that are years ahead. Uh, but most companies just started a couple of years early. Uh, and a lot of them actually have created a lot of stuff that they need to throw out and start from scratch again. So the first movers, aren't always the, uh, the best movers. Um, but yeah, we, we kind of see, uh, a little bit of everything and we were always like, how do you, like, do you need to always do the right design and all of it immediately?

• 9:31 - 9:52

And how do you approach that? And the new narrative that we've developed now is that the more conversations you have, the better they should be. So if you look at, if you're just developing a POC, that actually a few people, you know, as a part-time thing, because they'll have other responsibilities can actually hack together a functional chatbots, right.

• 9:52 - 10:34

And just, you know, prove a point or prove a concept and then, you know, maybe get more budget and get more traction and more stakeholder support. So actually where you are in that journey, as you go from like a functional assistant to an ultimately delightful assistant, as you do that, you need more resources, you need more people. So yeah, you go from two people, hacking something together on a Friday afternoon to teams that we have that are like a hundred people strong working on the AI assistance. Uh, and I think around like the COVID stuff, what you saw is that like, as soon as it hit, like everything was like, step on the brakes, we're not doing anything.

• 10:34 - 11:03

And then people adjusted a little bit. And then I think, yeah, I think it has definitely accelerated conversational AI, but by design, it accelerated a trend that was already happening. Right. So it's not like all of a sudden they need, they wanted this and they needed this and it's like, okay, now it's a no brainer to invest in it immediately. Um, so yeah, it's been good. Cov. It's been been good in that regard.

• 11:05 - 11:31

Yeah. Yeah. Um, you also, if a viewer from New York, I don't see the names here, authors there. I don't see. I know it's a long question. What finding your courses, but I can't find in books on conversational design and bots, uh, how would you put in spark that,.

• 11:32 - 12:16

Uh, uh, yeah. Yeah. It's not just our stuff stack up to other people. There's like a ton of courses out there. Some of them are actually pretty. Okay. Um, I think the main difference is that we're not just creating a course. What we actually have is a certification that is recognized by companies around the world. So we have a foundation that foundation has written a manifesto together with all its stakeholders, that manifesto calls for alignment and standardization conversation design, um, and what that supports is a human centric workflow, uh, that we teach and certify people on.

• 12:17 - 12:37

So we don't just teach people like how do you create a chat bot? We teach you like a step-by-step workflow that allows you to work at an enterprise. Uh, and these certificates are backed by open source network, which is part of Linux foundation. Salesforce is supporting, is rasa supporting this chat layer Carnegie.

• 12:37 - 13:09

Uh, so we actually have relationships with all these technology companies that recognize and endorse our certification program. So we envisioned that other people will actually develop courses and, um, those courses will prepare them for the exam that they take at CDI. Uh, ultimately we're really the standard for the enterprise of how, how you want to build a team. So compare as kind of, to like scrum or agile type things, right?

• 13:09 - 13:43

This is a workflow. Once you master this workflow, you can onboard teams, faster companies are looking for people with the certificate. So it's really helping to market as a whole to increase that liquidity, where it gives people their career perspective. It makes it easier to hire people. Technology companies know who's going to be using the products, but it's also a university. So we have a lot of universities that take our courses to prepare their students for jobs and conversationally on it. So I think that's like the difference of the problem we're trying to solve.

• 13:43 - 14:02

If you compare us to other courses, they're creating a course to teach you a skill, which is great. We're creating an industry standards that provides career opportunities and allows companies to scale their operation. So it's a win-win situation right now. We're doing a win-win and win-win situation.

• 14:04 - 14:35

Cool, cool. I like this other question. I was popping out the top. I Sally skipped one, but I like this one too. Do we have vertical specific courses? It's a short one said resonates with me quickly. What we're working on. A lot of that stuff. So we will be off more technology courses we'll be offering. So how do I now build something with rasa? How do I build something with Watson or whatever, then there's going to be interface specific courses. So we're currently working with haptic to create a WatsApp course.

• 14:35 - 14:58

So now how do I create some for WhatsApp? And then the next step is also more vertical, specific ones. And then, uh, one of the things that we look at now is kind of the highly regulated industries. So if I'm at an enterprise and at a pharmaceutical or a healthcare company, how do I make sure, you know, just a lot of legal information.