Avaya’s Karen Hardy on AI, Cloud, and Customer Experience

foreign from ZK research and I'm here live actually and person at the Avaya customer experience Center in New York before I get going though I just do want to give a quick shout out as always to eweek my media partner all zcasts are done in conjunction with the evg speaks program I'm joined by avaya's global VP of products Karen Hardy how you doing Karen hi Isaiah nice to see you and thank you for coming into our customer experience Center here in New York oh it's a great facility right it's certainly a pleasure to be here uh just do a quick intro on yourself you're being Global VP of products for a company the size of Aya that must be a big job well it is um I've been with Avaya for 10 years and um this this role is is really focused on ensuring that our strategy our roadmap um and as we're bringing our One Cloud platform it's it's really ensuring that we're driving the use cases and and the the solutions that are needed in the market today yeah I think you know we've gone through a really interesting phase over the last few years right with with the pandemic and work from home and hybrid work and it's changed the role of communications and collaboration technology both for workers and contact center and avaya's really been at the heart of that right so how is this latest transition away from remote work hybrid work change the product strategy yeah so so remote work really um we were able to support that that environment um from the get-go now as we're seeing um across all um verticals and industries uh whether that's the airline industry Healthcare Financial Services being able to bring in um hybrid and a hybrid model that's consistent across Communications and collaboration and this isn't going away no this is this is the forward thinking and uh one thing we've got to be able to do is because we know change is now at a rapid pace and it's constant we have to provide that environment for businesses to be able to make the changes that are needed so as we've built out our roadmap it's it's ensuring that we've got an open API open platform new ways in which uh communication and collaboration can be met yeah and I know just one good way of showing you know what you can do is just you know in this in this building itself right so uh a lot of the Innovation that you talked about I think is is certainly here now the the communications and collaboration industry to me it's a it's a fascinating one just because it's uh you know avaya's one of the bigger ones and your customers certainly who's who but you have dozens of competitors both small and large that span UC and CC so how does a company like yourself differentiate itself and show that innovation in a way that's easy to understand yeah so so we've got a very large um customer base um we've got a large Enterprise customers as well as targeting SMB customers as well um one thing we've done over the last couple of years is we've shown to customers from a commercial standpoint via subscription the ability for them to start to go on a path towards cloud um as well as the Innovation around not only moving to subscription but being able to bring in Cloud capabilities on top so if we look at things like AI we look at Social connector via social connections we're able to bring in those Cloud capabilities on top of that customer's existing environment so as that transitioning to Cloud they can start to adopt some of the latest technology capabilities that they can innovate themselves across of io1 cloud so I'm glad you brought up AI or artificial intelligence I think that's uh it's the biggest change agent we've had in Communications well maybe since ever right and avaya's been around a long time so you've gone through a lot of different transitions so can you talk a little about how you're using AI in both your UC and CC products to really deliver better experiences and and change the way we work yeah so from from the point of view of AI we've got Innovation that we're doing with AI we've also got partnership such as Google that we we bring in and bring in AI but from a perspective of um artificial intelligence you we can bring in um an immersive experience with agents and this can be leveraging AI to provide them with pointers at any given time during that interaction with the customer we can bring an AI for noise canceling um and a background so that can also go as part and parcel of the AI communication that we're bringing forward so I you know I think then a good way to think about that maybe is there's certain features are bringing in that will benefit me as a user right like noise block and things like that so I can now collaborate in place I couldn't before but then on the agent side you're also using it to me Aviation smarter so if I call them to an Avaya contact center which I wouldn't even know it's there but you know in those cases I should expect to get fast responses from the agent because you're making agents I suppose uh maybe super agent is a good way to think about them absolutely and I and I think that's one of the things that we can look at in terms of technology is how you can start using it and better using it um and what I mean by that is if we look at at chat Bots um you can bring that into an environment and start to use it but it could be a bad experience yeah and I think one of the things that we we have to look at is some of the processes and the processes behind the technology you're bringing in and you also have to have an environment and a way in which you can make those changes very easily yeah I think that's one of the interesting things to bring up about AI is is uh people's expectations right everybody expects AI to be perfect coming out of the box and sometimes it isn't right there it is uh there's a reason they call it machine learning because it has to learn and so I think um you know from the perspective of a customer if you're using AI in your contact center uh perhaps test it out first maybe it isn't perfect right away but over time it does get better and I think there is some element of expectations that maybe customers aren't quite ready for but I do agree with you I think chat Bots is something we've talked about in the industry for forever right I mean once you guys have had chatbots forever but without AI it can actually maybe uh hurt customer experience correct that's right so so we have a via virtual agent and and that's something that is out of the box and and 10 clicks or less you can you can start to use Virtual agent it can be built out to multiple different use cases as well or you can take some of that and customize it so I think this whole notion of the the low code no code you you giving you're giving the business now an opportunity to really start to dynamically change how they want their their business to operate yeah now um I know is a way of helping build more custom Solutions faster too last year you guys rolled out your experience Builder program right and that helped bring in a lot of uh technology partners and end users and things into the fold to almost could develop Solutions so can you talk about how your partnership strategies changed there I know you expanded what you're doing with Microsoft you mentioned Google before so how's that program changing what kind of benefits is that going to be yeah yeah so experience Builders has had um a tremendous ramp and it certainly enabled our partners to start to see how they can bring in value and and bring in the outcomes that customers are looking for um as well we recently announced uh the partnership with Microsoft that's expanding what we're doing with Azure um with one cloud and as we look at our customers they're they're looking at ways in which they can use Azure both from a public perspective as well as private we're enabling with with Microsoft the way in which we can bring in a private Cloud onto the the azure hyperscaler and the the same type of standardization allows us to speed up in in which we can make that environment available and then allow experienced Builders to surround it so the customization that can happen um can follow that speed in which we're bringing up um the environment the partnership with Microsoft is also giving us a a new reach a new market reach because Microsoft is also able to sell ccas a via ccas and enable us to go out and expand to new opportunities as well in addition we announced our partnership with Alcatel Lucerne Enterprise and that's enabling another two-way opportunity it's enabling a via to bring in some of their latest networking which is is really important as we look at the end-to-end solution for our customers and for alcoholism Enterprise to also resell a viacas so these Partnerships are bringing new markets New Opportunities and new ways in which we're selling the value to to our customers yeah now it's fascinating with both those Partnerships Microsoft and Ale is historically you would look at them as competitors right and I think more and more in the business World your ability to partner with competitors and be able to you know get in that coopetation model it really becomes an important part of success correct it pizza but it's also driven by our customers what what our customers are looking for so for the ale partnership it's it's about our customers looking for us to be able to provide the networking functionality um for for Microsoft our customers are looking to leverage hyperscalers um they they get many benefits in in the credits that they already have with Azure to be able to use those credits as part of the solution so I I think it's less about the competition at this point and it's more about what our customers are demanding so doing what's right for the customer correct yeah obviously a lot of vendors always forget about that so uh it's good you have it now um you mentioned One Cloud and one of the things I like about one cloud is that when when people think of cloud for whatever reason uh want to know the reason the media has driven it this way we we tend to think cloud of SAS right public Cloud equals Cloud but in fact there are multiple Cloud deployment models and one of the things I like about one cloud is that could actually be deployed there's a private Cloud public Cloud you know some combination of the two so can you talk about different customer examples maybe in different segments and how they would leverage the different deployment models in one cloud I'd say typical play from a a public Cloud perspective a multi-tenant perspective it's it's traditionally been an SMB type of customer in in terms of private Cloud it it's a an Enterprise customer but what we're seeing is really the convergence of public and private Cloud capabilities so a customer may leverage private Cloud for for some and public Cloud for other applications and we see that over the next two to three years the whole multi-tenant multi-instance really converges together and there's tremendous benefits in doing that um in terms of of private Cloud we have very large customers who are able to you know cross Healthcare airlines are able to leverage private cloud but also bring in uh public Cloud functionality as well and the examples of that is is AI is social connections um that we are able to deliver to them yeah in fact my research shows that in the General application space anyways and and then Computing 95 of customers expect to be running a hybrid Cloud Model uh over time and so I don't know why Communications be any different but I think it's going to play out that way oh it is and we're seeing it already so yes absolutely all right Karen one last question you are had a product and so for the people watching this can you give us a sense of what what's coming from Avaya without getting into any Safe Harbor violations right I don't want to get and get you in trouble so but but what can we expect from a via over the next next couple days of course well if you if you think about Avaya via's got a a diverse customer base we have a lot of Legacy customers Legacy products and platforms that they're they're continuing to use and innovate and we want to be able to provide a path for every customer a path to Cloud for every customer and and that's really important for us so as we see um the the desktop environment we want consistency across that as we look at analytics we want a better way in which we're bringing in analytics data for our customers as we're looking at routing we want to be able to provide the most Innovative routing as well so the immersion of how we can bring in AI how we can bring analytics and how we can bring Innovation to the desktop is what you're going to start to see and continue to see us us doing well they're path to Cloud especially in your customers isn't simple and I I think sometimes in this world of you know Cloud we get a little mixed up thinking that the needs of a global Enterprise are the same as a small company right I know some of the larger Enterprises I've talked to have looked at going all public Cloud but then have realized from a data protection data sovereignty things like that it you know it didn't really do what they had to do before and avaya's got some of the biggest customers out there right I think you get top 10 Banks yeah and so their path the cloud is significantly more complex than the 500 person you know grocery store down the street right so yeah and their expectation is is to have cloud-like functionality but have the benefits of of private and and that convergence of bringing public Cloud functionality to private is is the focus that we have well thank you and so uh you know and somebody else say keep on doing that good work you know I know you guys have really The Who's Who of your customer base and moving those customers to Cloud isn't always the easiest thing to do but uh I think that's where a lot of the Innovation is going to be in the next few years so thanks for joining me today thanks I have some thanks for coming by today yeah so thanks for joining me on the zcast today don't forget to click subscribe and I'll see you next time on zcast good foreign

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