>> Innovation Day, brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Rick, here with theCube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale. It's a very cool space, I think it's grown up over a number of years as they've originated with some acquired companies, and now they got a huge setup here, and we had a big day today talking about customer experience, and really, if you look at the Comcast Voice Remote, and there's a lot of stuff going on that's maybe under the covers, you don't really give Comcast credit for, but they're actually doing a lot. And we're excited to, kind of dive into it a little bit deeper with our next guest, she's Annie Weskesser, she's a CMO of Uniphore. Annie, welcome. >> Yeah, thank you for having me here today. >> Absolutely. So what is Uniphore, for people that aren't familiar with the company. >> So Uniphore is a global leader in conversational service automation, and our vision is to bridge the gap between human and machine, through voice AI and automation. >> That's a mouth full. >> Yes. >> Conversational... >> Service. >> Service. >> Yes. >> So, people talk, and so you guys are heavily involved in voice. So what are the applications where people are using your voice? >> Yep, well primarily our focus is call centers. >> Okay. >> So large enterprises who have massive call centers, where we want to go in and help them with AI and automation, to help better listen to their customers, help better listen to the customers voice, and solve the problems in a faster manner. >> So I don't have to repeat my account number six different times to six different agents. >> Exactly, right. >> Or caught an in IVR cycle, or perhaps the chat that you were talking to doesn't-- The person on the phone, you have to repeat your story. This is something where the AI and automation will actually assist the agent to become a superhero. >> So, it's pretty interesting cause you know there's a lot of conversation about AI and ML, but really you know where it's going to have its impact is applied AI. >> Yes. And you said the company started out really more just on a pure voice, but now you're applying more and more kind of AI in the back end. So what kind of opportunities do you have now beyond just simply being able to do voice conversion?. >> To the first part of your question, the company started at IIT Madras back in 2008. And originally the focus of the company was really centered on voice, voice being the lowest common denominator and in Indie where the languages are 260 you know, potential languages to understand and maybe 25 at the top. We set out really to focus on voice and then realize that customer service was a large market and somewhere we can have a big impact. >> Right, right. So you reckon as you said a 100 different languages. >> A 100 different languages through our platform which is pretty incredible when you think about it. All of the different people calling in to customer service potentially or maybe through a chatbot or a voicebot to get their issues solved. >> And then you integrate in whatever the core system is that the customer services agent are using. >> Yes. >> So what are the types of tips and tricks that the call agent gets by using your guys service? >> So think about it as a platform where the customer can help they agents be more affective agents. So one of the things that call centers struggle with is something called after call work, where agents may spend two to three minutes after a call, summarizing the call. One of the things that our technology does and this is primarily for one of our customers who's a health care client. They said "Wouldn't it be great if we can automate that completely". So we've taken the after call work for one customer client, taken that two to three minutes down to 10 seconds, where that work that the agent would have done is completely summarized and the agent validates it, can correct it if needed and its completely done. So that not only saves the agent time to either pick up more calls and help other customers or it can get them of the phone in a quicker manner to save the call center more money. >> So that's doing more than just simply providing a transcript of the call which is something a different track than actually listening into to provide suggestions is actually taking it to the next level in terms of what categorizing, what type of call, the outcome etc. >> it's actually quite interesting because often times less than 1% of calls are listened to somewhere between 1 and 10% of calls are listened to in calls centers. So we can listen to a 100% of those calls in addition we offer something called that's more along the line of like a live agent coach to where the agent can concentrate on the conversation with the customer which is the primary thing listening to the customer. And our technology will serve you up coaching mechanism in terms of getting to faster resolution for the customer and getting them better insights to be almost a superhero of a agent. >> Right, and I would imagine the accuracy in terms of recording what happened in the call to go back and do the analytics and have a text base search you can do all types of analysis on those calls which was data that was probably just lost before right into (mumbles) >> You're exactly right. I think the accuracy is clearly a lot lower than if you were to have the AI and automation and Machine learning technology there. >> So the other conversation in the sit down that we had earlier today was really about driving a customer centric culture in your own company, not only just enabling it but really building it inside. I wonder if you could share some of the things that you guys have done to help make sure that everybody stays focused on the objective, which is the customer. >> Yip, I think it really starts at the top it starts with the leader of the organization. So we have a CEO whose extremely focused on customer centricity and in fact its our number one core value within the organization. So you see everyone from the CEO down to the rest of the organization completely focused on the customer and their needs. >> What about when the customer doesn't know what they need? What about you know, you bringing a new technology and your inviting a slightly different process or a slightly different change and your saying "Hey, this is actually a better way to keep text and transactions and we actually have a really coach that can help", you know, kind of guy to people. How do you help move customers to a place they don't necessarily know they want to go? >> Yeah, I mean you find that a lot, right. Its not necessarily the technology that we're providing for today but its having the innovation and having the foresight to create a platform that will be future proof. So that's critical, you know, I think that there are a lot of customers who might not know what they need today but that's our job to help them innovate and push the envelope on all things AI and automation. >> Right, I'm just curious to in terms of the impact of your technology on kind of the tracking software for those call center agents, right. So this is a group of people that have to process a lot of calls, you know everything is track to the minute and you know its funny I had a demo with Westworld and you know when Westworld's funny cause we started treating machines like machines and they wanted to be treated like people sometimes I wonder on some of these technologies You know is it enabling them to have more time to be more thoughtful, is it enabling them to have more time to get the better outcomes or is it sometimes perceived as 'oh my gosh you just trying to jam' you know, 'four more calls on in my hour by taking care of my two more minutes that I used to spend wrapping up the call". Do you think about those things and the end customer? >> The time is really the premium, right. So the number one focus is giving people time back and whether that's the customer who's calling in and you want to solve an issue and get them faster resolution or whether that's the agent that wants to free up more time in having the conversation with the customer, solving their problem and then getting of the phone I think that's the most effective way of doing it. >> Final question in terms of voice and the evolution of voice. `Cause I don't think people are really completely tuned in certainly not people old like we are. What are some of the conversations when people finally get, you know, kind of the enabler that voice communications opens up that's not necessarily available with texts or not necessarily available with other types of channels? >> Yeah, I mean I see it most easily in my children they expect everything to be voice enabled and so everything from the Comcast remote that they pick up in our living room everywhere they go when they see a remote they expect everything to be voice enabled. So that's really the future and I think a lot of customer service will be listening to your customers voice however, they want to communicate with you, whatever channel they want to communicate on. >> Great, really cool story Annie and thanks for taking the few minutes and sharing it with us. >> Yeah, thanks for inviting me. >> All right, she's Annie, I'm Jeff your watching theCube with the Comcast CX Experience Innovation day here at the Sillicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching see you next time.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Nicola Carotti. He is the head of Cloud and Collaboration at Intesasanpaolo. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you for invitation. >> So Intesasanpaolo is the largest banking group in Italy. Tell our viewers a little bit about the bank and also about what you do there. >> So first of all, a few words about myself: I'm 47 years old and am married with a lovely wife and two daughters. Probably they are watching me from Italy. >> (laughs) Hello! >> About my job, I've worked for Intesasanpaolo for 17 years, a lot of time. It's always fun, is a great job, is a great place to work for. Intesasanpaolo is now the biggest bank in Italy, and one of the top banks in Europe. We also have a business plan to help us to grow a little bit more and more to become the first digital bank in Europe. We also have a business plan for IT, of course. We are working on innovation, on Collaboration staff, to increase the productivity of the people. And we will talk later about it. Also the digitalization of the bank in the process. So Intesasanpaolo is now, for me, is a good place to work. It's a good bank in Italy. We do also a lot for social. We invest in social, and we give money back to the community and to Italy. It's very important for me. >> So talk a little bit about what your role is at the bank. >> I am the head of Cloud and Collaboration. In the past I led the data center infrastructure from mainframe to open system. Now I am the head of Cloud and Collaboration as told before. It's a very important role for me because Cloud and Collaboration are important topics for us, and we work a lot on them. About Cloud, we work on the strategy, we work on the integration platform to merge different functionalities. On the Collaboration, we are working on a modern workplace. >> So, Nicola, it's interesting to hear you talk about cloud. We're here at the Microsoft show. Microsoft plays across a lot of different areas. What's the relationship between the bank and Microsoft? >> Microsoft, obviously, is a big partner for us. We are a big customer for Microsoft. It's, I think, through Microsoft Cloud. In the last years, Microsoft has the biggest growing cloud that I've ever seen. What I can say, it's a very enterprise-ready cloud platform. It's easier to manage a foreign, big enterprise, like us. We are still using cloud-- When I talk about cloud, I think hybrid model. And we have important private cloud installation. We deliver 90% of our machine totally automatically through our private cloud. And we can also extend our data center on the public cloud in Asia. We have a connection between our data center and the Microsoft data center in a hybrid model. So it's an extension of the data center. We also deliver the 40%-- 45% of all our delivery operation are made through our private cloud portal. So it's an important investment that we did on cloud. >> We know data is very important to all companies, especially not only security, but how you can leverage data is important for financial institutions like yourself. You've mentioned a hybrid model. That's something we've been hearing from a lot of customers. We're here in the Cohesity booth, and I understand you're using them. Maybe talk a little about how you think about the data protection in a multi-cloud world. >> We started to use Cohesity some years ago. We were the first customer in Europe, and the first bank in the world. Very early adopter. Few words about Cohesity: Cohesity is a very smart company and very nice people to work with. So we started to work together to increase the functionalities that they provide, to be more enterprise ready. Now, speaking about the data, obviously for a bank, the data protection is one of the main points. And Cohesity helped us to do an easier process to manage data. We are working with them to increase the data protected with Cohesity as a secondary storage. We are looking also at new functionality that they are providing. It's the connection to the cloud. So I think they can help us, to enable us to use a little bit more of the cloud in that hybrid model. So enable the hybrid model of the cloud, can be easier for us, I think. >> One of the biggest companies-- One of the biggest challenges that so many companies face is staying innovative and staying ahead of the game. How do you and your team-- I know you said workplace productivity, collaboration are really important things for you. How do you keep your team working at the cutting edge? >> Nice question. I can speak about technical innovation, because in our technical department, the IT department, we work a lot on innovation. We have a model. We define a model for the age of innovation. It seems a contradiction, but we decided to invest in innovation. Initially we find some prosperous company. We have some connection in Sillicon Valley, with Italian and European investors, and this is why we became the first customer for Cohesity when Cohesity was so small. They had a great road map but they were very small. Like them, we also adopted Damonte it's a container as a surface platform. When we adopted last year, they were very small as well. But they are smart guys as well, nice company, good investor. The DNA of the company seems good. So we decided to adopt the technology. It's also an opportunity for my people, for the people of the bank, for the people of IT, to stay in touch with the innovative community of Sillicon Valley, of the investor. It's very important for them, because in the past, working IT in a bank wasn't so nice. So this is why we invest a lot in innovation, and this is why our people love to do that. >> Finally, you're here in the States for only a couple of days. You're heading back to Italy. At this conference, what has impressed you? What do you think you will take away from what you're learning here, what you're seeing, what you're hearing, and share with your colleagues back home? >> First of all, the relationships. I met a lot of people, a lot of business, other customers, a lot of banks, so I will have a lunch with another bank, big bank in Europe so we can exchange. We saw that we have the problems, the same path. We are all working in the same area. It's good, it's comfortable for us. The other point is we saw, with my colleagues here, we saw some nice innovative companies to work with. It's a very interesting, was very useful for me. >> Nicola Carotti of Intesasanpaola, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been really fun talking to you. >> Thank you. Thank you so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft's Ignite coming up in just a little bit.