If your team is struggling to implement AI or looking to understand where and how to invest in AI, Relevance360 is the key to helping you create a strategic approach to AI that will future proof your enterprise.
Our recent webinar event was hosted byCoveo CMO, Sheila Morin, and included CEO Louis Tetu, AI Futurist and former Head of GTM at OpenAI, Zack Kass, as well as some of Coveo’s customers and partners. Forrester analyst Rowan Curran also joined the conversation bringing insights about the critical impact of augmented search.
Co-Founder and CTO Laurent Simoneau wrapped up the conversation, showcasing some of Coveo’s latest innovations. Read on for key takeaways from the event.
Read on for all the highlights from our special 10th anniversary event, or watch on-demand:
The Game Changer: The Application of AI In Digital Experiences
At Coveo, we believe the future is business-to-person, powered by AI search and generative AI at each point-of-experience. Points-of-experience happen millions of times every day across enterprises whether you’re a shopper, a buyer, a consumer, a partner, a patient, a citizen, or an employee.
People have come to expect highly individualized, conversational, prescriptive, and ultimately coherent digital experiences that anticipate their needs whether shopping, learning, connecting with someone, searching for answers, etc.
With so many points-of-experience, only AI can effectively help enterprises successfully deliver individualized, trusted, and connected experiences at scale that will meet and exceed people’s expectations and optimize them to drive superior business outcomes.
Optimizing Points-of-Experience At Scale
Optimizing these points-of-experiences is all about relevance. From a competitive standpoint, relevance is extremely important. When a consumer is online, they’re only one browser window away from a better experience. Additionally, people greatly value their time, which is highly impacted by the relevance of any given digital touchpoint. Knowing this, it becomes imperative that companies deliver relevant experiences to be competitive in the marketplace.
However, optimizing experiences must go beyond relevant results. A modern digital experience starts with a paradigm where users can express their intent. Rather than siloed search areas for different needs, we see an intent-based approach that consolidates the search box into a much more intelligent intent box.
This is what we call: The Unified Relevance Experience – where product search, conversations, answering, chat, and recommendations all converge into one, single, coherent experience.
AI is crucial in achieving this because of its ability to deal with a high volume of content from multiple sources that needs to be delivered to a large and diversified audience. Only AI can allow enterprises to optimize digital experiences at scale.
Relevance to The Business
Beyond relevance and personalization to the user, AI also balances relevance to the business. It provides the best individualized experiences to each user at every interaction, while simultaneously ensuring that the business imperatives of the company are met. For example, business-aware algorithms can reorder e-commerce results based on inventory, cost of shipping, return potential, or even margins.
These implications are so important, that we’re seeing a vast majority of enterprises C-suites across the world starting to pay attention. According to a January 2023, BCG Global C-suite survey, 89% percent of the C-suite ranks GenAI and AI as top priority for 2024.
Coveo’s Advanced AI Solution
Coveo has been working on AI enterprise solutions for over a decade. We have built one, single platform that integrates machine learning, deep learning, large language models, semantic search, AI recommendations, generative answering, and unified personalization. These are all integrated within every digital experience, connecting these digital interactions across an entire enterprise.
Our goal at Coveo is to help enterprises gain what we refer to as the AI Experience Advantage: bringing AI at every point-of-experience. We firmly believe that adopting AI is imperative to success and that enterprises will either decide to adopt and embrace AI — or compete against it.
Zack Kass Interview: The Impact of AI and Generative AI on Enterprise Digital Experience Strategy
How Can Business Leaders Approach the Implementation of AI?
It’s important to open the conversation with this question: What does AI mean for humanity?
For many leaders, overcoming this first question is an obstacle in and of itself because of the mystery, fear, and curiosity surrounding AI. But, once leaders come to terms with the fact that AI can be a positive thing, and lead to a future of abundance, they can approach it with an optimistic view. This is a critical step.
The next step is asking: What does it mean for your business?
This should be approached like any other, critical strategy. Leaders should look at the opportunities, threats, and weaknesses, and tactfully figure out where AI can be applied successfully as a strength.
Many companies are trying to figure out the many places where AI can be applied. weYet half of the battle is figuring out where businesses should not apply it. The key is to push AI in two major areas of your business, asking: What are the two things your business must do?
Then, you just need to assume that the technology companies that power the rest of your business will adopt this revolution and provide you with new economies of scale and efficiency.
Major Change in Business and the AI Competitive Advantage
It’s going to become very obvious very quickly to consumers which companies are harnessing this technology effectively and which are not. Consumers are about to raise their expectations for what personalization means by an incredible degree.
People simply cannot go back from seeing and experiencing the interaction that ChatGPT provides. Essentially, consumers are going to demand this type of experience from all businesses providing goods and services.
Every company should assume that hyper-personalization is no longer a dream – it’s a requirement.
“We are truly months away from a world in which companies that don’t provide their customers with a natural language, hyper-personalized experience, will become dinosaurs relative to their peers.”
– Zack Kass, former Head of Go To Market, Global at OpenAI
Rowan Curran Interview: Winning GenAI Experiences Start With Great Search
Over the past year and a few months, many have felt generative AI has appeared out of nowhere with the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. People are starting to understand and imagine the many implications of it for business and beyond.
There is a huge amount of excitement and a huge amount of pressure within enterprises to start building applications around GenAI. The most common approach to these knowledge retrieval use cases is some version of retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Another common use case for generative AI is using large language models for writing and knowledge support. This includes everything from marketers writing emails to grant writers using it to write requests for research grants.
Companies have also started integrating generative AI into their knowledge management and knowledge creation process because these language models allow you to reformat, readjust, and change content to fit whatever need you have. Additionally, there are many use cases for content summarization and transformation – for example, summarizing call center transcripts.
At the enterprise level, the current focus is heavily on search and knowledge retrieval. What’s needed for a true enterprise search experience is the ability for a platform to search across multiple data sources and pull various types of information while dealing with security access controls, chunking, intent, scaling, reranking, and more. Companies need a platform that can support this dynamic interaction with large sets of data, content, and rules.
The Magic of Coveo: Relevance Coupled With Better Business Outcomes
Laurent Simoneau, President and CTO at Coveo
Relevance is key. It matches content with the user intent by understanding what the user wants and delivering the most relevant results for that user. But at the same time, we couple that with supporting the best business outcomes, and that’s done through merchandising.
This is the magic of the Coveo platform. We have the unique ability to couple those two different objectives together and focus on relevance for the user while aligning with business outcomes for the merchandiser.
Different Methods, The Same Platform
Coveo provides exceptional relevance across different methods, all on the same platform. This includes:
- Lexical search (or classic keyword search): This is not going away. People will always want to discover what’s available when they don’t know exactly what they’re looking for.
- Semantic search: The ability to understand a key intent across a longer sentence or deeper question.
- Recommendations: This is all about understanding where a user is in the experience to then surface content that is relevant.
- Question answering (new as of last year): This leverages semantic search to surface the best excerpts or passages of results and uses that to provide an answer by also leveraging our large language model services.
Different Methods Tailored for Different Audiences
Coveo has a lot of customers who are using the platform anonymously, hink about large B2C or retail where people tend to log in once they’re ready to buy. Once logged in, personalization is easily achieved through their profile but all of the anonymous experience before buying is just as important. We’ve invested a lot in the past few years into session-based personalization and the ability to know with a few clicks what is relevant for the user or the shopper without them having to log in.
With an authenticated user audience, you have access to user profiles, past transactions, queries, etc. The Coveo platform can dynamically support different methods for these different audiences at the same time.
Syncing With CDPs
When authenticated, there’s a lot of value in synchronizing with a CDP (a customer data platform). For example, Coveo synchronizes with one of our customers, SAP’s CDP. So Coveo shares with this CDP all of the behavioral data and intent that is captured within the Coveo experience. The CDP can then use this behavioral data and repurpose it in other models or other experiences across their organization.
New Merchandising Features For 2024
We have rebuilt our merchandising platform on our core Coveo platform so that merchandising is a built-in experience. There’s no need for multiple logins as it works hand-in-hand with the other capabilities of the Coveo platform.
You can easily access analytics for queries, view stats, and performance for those queries in a given context. We’ve built this feature based on feedback of our merchandisers who wanted this kind of granularity.
You can now manually boost and bury items with specific rules, as well as pin specific results to a position for any given query. This is currently available for customers and we expect to build even more new capabilities in 2024.
Applying Generative Answering to Commerce
The value proposition here is very interesting. Generative answering in commerce transforms the shopping cart into a destination. In other words, our commerce customers are not only going to sell the ingredients to a recipe, but also provide the recipe itself. This feature is already being rolled out to a few of our large commerce customers.
As an example: In the home improvement environment, if you type in “tips to build outside kitchen with a barbecue,” you can get the instructions on how to build an outside kitchen with a barbecue, and then easily shop at each retailer for the individual items needed.
CTA: generative AI in ecommerce
Curious About What’s Coming at Coveo?
The above was just a taste of what this year’s Relevance 360 offered attendees. If you couldn’t make it live, we’ve got the full recording for you!
Also, dive into Coveo’s Spring 2024 offerings in AI Search & Generative Answering to transform CX & EX and drive ROI. Explore our latest in Relevance Generative Answering (RGA) through our on-demand webinars.