IBM and Lenovo announced today that have renewed an existing agreement under which IBM will be making use of IBM Watson to inject artificial intelligence (AI) into customer support services provided by IBM on behalf of Lenovo over the next four years.
Valued at $240 million, this agreement calls for Lenovo to expose customers to IBM’s Virtual Assistant for Technical Support service enabled by the IBM Watson cognitive computing platform to allow customers to leverage natural language capabilities and contextual recognition to deliver a personalized support experience using bots.
IBM will also provide Lenovo will access to its call centers and augmented reality (AR) technologies to improve field service. IBM also plans to make use of application programming interfaces from its Weather.com business unit to feed alerts concerning weather conditions into field service applications.
Those capabilities will not only lower the cost of support, but it should also reduce the amount of time required to resolve customer support issues, says Juhi McClelland, general manager of IBM’s Technology Support Services (TSS) business in North America.
IBM, however, does not view those capabilities will replace the need for human support, but rather augment it,” adds McClelland.
“IBM sees the future about being man and machine,” says McClelland.
McClelland says decisions concerning how customer support is delivered will be driven by customers for years to come. Some may prefer to not wait on hold for a human, while others will still prefer to engage with another person, notes McClelland.
McClelland describes the services IBM will provide as being “channel neutral.” In some case, Lenovo partners will opt to leverage the automated services provided by IBM alongside the support they provide. Most channel partners don’t have the technical and financial resources required to build AI and AR applications on their own, notes McClelland.
Going forward, IBM also expects to leverage blockchain technologies to streamline both the approval process for what services can be delivered as well as eliminating the need for costly audits to determine what services were delivered by whom and when, says McClelland. All that data will be stored in an immutable general ledger based on a blockchain network.
It’s still too early to say how the rise of bots and AI will impact how Level One, Two and Three services are delivered. But one thing that is clear that is technicians across the channel might soon want to get used to the idea of having a digital buddy working alongside them on every call.
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