LivePerson thinks it is imperative that its conversational platform allows businesses to extract value from any bot integration, whether native automation built into LiveEngage, or by integrating any third-party NLP, like IBM Watson. “The partnership with DMI is a great complement to LivePerson’s conversational commerce solution set,” said Manlio Carrelli, executive vice president Enterprise Business Group at LivePerson. What excites you about this potential with augmented reality and how you feel like that might even be able to take this conversational commerce to the next level? LoCascio: Yeah. And, you know, we’ve taken a different approach in — first of all, I think conversational commerce will be highly disruptive to big tech, and so if everyone’s wondering, at least this is my perspective, if everyone’s wondering, how big tech gets disrupted, because today there’s a perspective that, they are just going to be big forever and they’re going to dominate and they’re going to buy companies and then compete and do what they do. Like, $900 you spend online to buy a shoe, you may never try it on. Operator, you may close the line.
And so I think to your earlier point, what I found is that you may not do that job every single day, but understanding what your team does every day. So, when you think of that, that says, consumers need to speak to someone, whether it’s healthcare or retail. So, this I think is more important than ever when it comes to what’s happening with retail. And even if we go back to stores, I think even retailers that thought people wouldn’t buy if they couldn’t come to a store, are seeing that people are buying. So, that’s where we’re seeing a big, big shift right now in the use of our platform. So, what we’re seeing is, with COVID is, it’s just amazing, like, big telcos and banks, and insurance companies are all like, boy, this crisis and now that we have agents working at home and that’s not working out too great, we got to open up our backends, we’ve got to now get machines connecting to those backends and then we’ve got to create conversational experiences, so that the consumers can have a very frictionless way to get things done with brands.
And we’ve done that because the largest banks, insurance companies, they need their data secured in a way, and this is conversational data, which then usually has transactional data connected to it, account data. Right now, we went from, like, 50% of our conversations had some automation in them pre-COVID and now we’re up to over 70%. And our large enterprise, it’s 100% of those customers in the enterprise, the largest brands have automation in the conversations. With next 24 months, we expect virtually every large brand to decide how they want to participate in this. So this entrepreneur has incredible, inspiring community to create change around him, which I want to hear more about. FeedingNYC was launched during the aftermath of 9/11 in the hopes of making a difference within the local community. I’ve really got to I got to find another way to make more money than what I’m making now. I’m reiterating my original claim today.
Now, AI, obviously something that is playing a big role in many businesses out there today. I mean, you see companies out there today that are focusing on, you know, you mentioned, obviously, the IoT, all of the different connections in the world, we see 5G rolling out, so many devices that are going to be connected here in the coming decade. Through a Karma account, which is like a savings account, BELLA goes out and helps other members who are part of the bank, of which there are roughly 30,000. And so, if I go out and I use the BELLA debit card to buy something at Starbucks, it’ll pop up sometimes and say, “Hey, Rob, Elizabeth is picking up your coffee today, have a great day.” And I have the ability to send a little heart back and all that. And a lot of times those legacy systems, they’re so bad that there needs to be a human accessing, because there’s no way for a machine to access them. Moser: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. But during COVID, we had a lot of our customers, sort of, testing it, and we brought together all those AI services, which is about looking at the intents of the consumer, how do you build automated conversations and how then how do you connect those automated conversations to backend systems.