Every business or IT leader I talk to today has customer experience (CX) improvement as one of their top initiatives. My research shows that 95% of companies now compete on CX versus only 22% a mere five years ago. While there is no silver bullet to improve CX, AI is viewed as an enabler of change allowing companies to deliver differentiated experiences.
Accenture Plc Tuesday announced the launch of the Accenture AI Refinery framework, developed on Nvidia Corp.’s new AI Foundry service. The offering, designed to enable clients to build custom large language models using Llama 3.1 models, enables enterprises to refine and personalize these models with their own data and processes to create domain-specific generative AI solutions.
The artificial intelligence industry is filled with big vendors and upstarts, and Amazon Web Services Inc.’s AWS Summit in New York City earlier this months provided Amazon the platform to make its claim as the leader in AI. To do that, the company put Matt Wood (pictured), vice president of AI products at AWS, in the keynote spot.
There has been plenty of hype and ballyhoo around artificial intelligence and networking, but much of the vendor focus has been AI for networking, where AI is used to improve network operations. The other side of the AI coin is networking for AI, where a network must be designed and provisioned to support an AI implementation. Though many businesses will likely deploy AI in the cloud, making the supporting network the problem of the hyperscaler, 58% of respondents to a recent ZK Research/theCube Research study stated they have deployed or will be deploying AI in their own private data center.
Last week, Avaya announced that its president and chief executive officer, Alan Masarek, will retire at the end of the calendar year (2024). His successor, Patrick Dennis, will take the helm and steer Avaya in its next phase. Mr. Dennis is an accomplished CEO with experience in enterprise software, SaaS, cybersecurity, and communications. He is currently the CEO of Venafi, a security vendor being acquired by CyberArk.