A World with Chatbots and AI

With recent technological advancements in chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI), neuro-linguistic programming, machine learning, internet of things (IoT) and web speech APIs, it is now possible to streamline interactions between computer and human languages more effectively. Everyday practically we see a Google Home or Alexa add on social media and on television, and this widens our vision about its application. So let’s have a glimpse on it.

A brief about chatbots

A chatbot is a service that people interact with via a chat interface. You can ask questions using your voice or by typing in the same way you would ask a person. The chatbot will usually respond in a conversational style, and it may carry out actions in response to your conversation (for example, order something for you). It often runs inside a popular messaging application, such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, or SMS. It answers your question, rather than directing you to a website.

Can the applications be replaced with Chatbots ?

To the end user, it may appear that systems of Chatbots like Alexa have replaced software applications (apps) when we ask them to book meetings in our calendars and purchase train tickets for us. In reality, they will encapsulate the apps and sit on top of them. While we may see fewer app icons on our smartphones, we will still need apps in the background for fulfilment and as data repositories.

Why should we discuss about chatbots ?

Eventually, the goal of a futuristic chatbot is to be able to interact with users as a human does. As the saying goes, “the best interface is no interface.” Voice chat is trending with the introduction of smart speakers like Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod, etc.

How chatbots can help Small/Medium businesses ?

Bots are a glimpse into the future of business, and they have powerful implications on the business ecosystem. They have several advantages:

  1. 24×7 availability – A bot exists digitally unlike a human being, and can thus be pressed into service continuously without any interference.
  2. Highly Customisable – Bots are capable of carrying out a wide array of tasks because of their inherent flexibility.
  3. Affordable and Powerful – In the current scenario, chatbots can be developed for a small amount. Many options already exist, with the most popular being Facebook’s Messenger bot.
  4. Saves Resources – Employing a chatbot to handle basic customer interactions can free up valuable human resources without a decline in productivity.

Types of Chatbots –

  1. One operates based on a set of rules. It can only respond to very specific commands. If you, as the user don’t use the right command or words, the chatbot doesn’t know what you mean.
  2. On the other hand the other type uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide the best response. We’ll call these AI-powered chatbots.The AI aspect in a chatbot is based on machine learning. It is known as Natural Language Processing; it has the proficiency to understand a conversation and mimic human speech. An artificial intelligence (AI) agent in a chatbot achieves the goal through the ‘sense-think-act’ cycle.

How Chatbots can Revitalize Customer Engagement for SME’s?

Broadly Chatbots powered with AI can be used for two purposes:

  • For Enterprise – Today’s chatbots are powerful personal assistants. They can call an Cab, place a lunch order, make a hotel reservation, order office supplies when you get low and even help manage your calendar. Let’s face it, just scheduling a single meeting can take 15 minutes or more and when you add up how many meetings you schedule, it’s a significant time commitment for a small business.
  • For Consumers – Chatbots provide better service to users. Mainly in these following ways:
    • Quick Response time – Compared to a human being, a smart computer program will answer queries much quicker. This, coupled with an AI chatbot’s machine learning and multi-tasking abilities make it a highly efficient virtual assistant that can revolutionise customer interaction metrics.
    • Improved Conversions – Chatbots can study past search data and offer more personalised shopping options via retargeting. The AI is constantly learning, and it can pull up multiple options that will be more appealing to the user based on their search history and captured data points. This can lead to increased conversions for you in the long term.

How does Chatbots improve ROI?

Some instance where bots have worked out really well and undoubtedly have cleared the points regarding ROI as they turned out to be a boon in the industry.

  • Chatbots in Finance Industry- Chatbots found their way into the Finance industry as a virtual assistant within Mobile Banking Apps. Bots act as a platform were customers can make the payment of Bills, and transfer and deposit funds. According to a survey done by Abi AI, one of the top most IT firm could save 360,000 hours of manpower by deploying bots which helped them analyse complex legal contracts faster than a human could do.
  • Chatbots in Restaurants and Retail Industry- The idea of introducing chatbots in restaurant and the retail industry proved to be a smart one, as it has been helping famous food chains in reducing the order time of the customers considerably. Bots also help in saving several employees working hours as well, which in turn made them more efficient.

DevOps – Value Proposition for SME’s

DevOps is a methodology which solves the operational and logistics challenges of technology Delivery.

What is DevOps –

Imagine these scenarios –

  • Scaling up your Technology infrastructure and Landscape for another geographical region
  • Scaling up your Online Marketplace for Thanksgiving or Black Friday sale
  • Recovering from a massive data center failure
  • How to improve Go To Market Time, to improve customer satisfaction ?
  • How to improve delivery time to the customers?  
  • How to get faster ROI ?

To address above points what is your game plan? How much is automation involved here? How much manual effort and time does it cost? Is there a way that these all can be optimised? Answer is DevOps. If you have it in place you are already ahead of most competitors. To get the details on how these questions get answered by DevOps keep reading ..

DevOps In Business

Why is DevOps important ?

Advancement today has set for a world which is full of new technology that change at fast pace like Big Data, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and so on. Inspired by these just-in-time development and business process improvement, DevOps has become a global trend in the tech industry.   

Advantage of DevOps –

DevOps is a culture,  where as the term suggests Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) teams align much closer together and share in-between knowledge in improved ways. But DevOps is much more than this – it is a ‘state of mind’, a common approach to a problem. Businesses today has a point in implementing DevOps only if it’s directly contributing to the company’s increased productivity, effectiveness and, profitability. The only way that it is possible for small and medium enterprises is when the Development and Operations team work in sync and streamlining the provision of tech solutions that solve the business needs. Moreover Unbounded collaboration is achieved with notably higher rates of employee loyalty and engagement.

How to improve delivery time to the customers?

Analysis- DevOps methodologies when implemented in business models enable to break the complex and big projects into smaller modules of functionality that can be delivered on a steady rate. Hence the clarity and speed up of the release schedules and delivery timeline are reduced, allowing to create a buffer for any future changes on the same project.

Recovering from a massive data center failure

Analysis- Research also show that DevOps companies have an almost supernatural advantage of 30x the deploy frequency of their non-DevOps peers. Meantime to recovery process of DevOps also reduces 168x reduction to recover customer failures.

How to get faster ROI ?

Analysis- DevOps allows a business to release twice as fast, they can effectively double their annual revenue.Getting Paid for Faster returns in DevOps Is basically, reverse-chronological order of importance for an ongoing business:

  • Get money after you bill.
  • Bill after you deliver benefit.
  • Deliver benefit after you ship.
  • Ship after you’ve made the product.
  • Get money to make product.

Over a mid to long term duration there is 20% increase in annual revenue would be on par with enterprise averages, thus definitely a better ROI.

 

How to improve Go To Market Time and improve customer satisfaction ?

Analysis- Failure in DevOps is a mandate notion which is taken as a must to happen in real world. DevOps provides embracing the notion that you will fail and that you should even practice failing, this is a key mental step to focusing on meantime to recovery (MTTR). Moreover the process of Continuous deployment = continuous feedback allows  a chance to test users’ satisfaction in real time, adjust their products to customers’ needs, thus shaping a tighter market-product fit. Hence reducing failure factors in business models.

 

Realisation of the Hour!

DevOps for business

Currently Agile teams used automated build, test automation, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

With DevOps that is extended further to “Infrastructure as Code”, configuration management, metrics and monitoring schemes, a toolchain approach to tooling, virtualisation and cloud computing to accelerate change in the modern infrastructure world. DevOps brings some tools on the block as well like configuration management (puppet, chef, ansible, cfengine), orchestration (zookeeper, noah, mesos), monitoring, virtualisation and containerisation (AWS, OpenStack, vagrant, docker) and many more. This makes the SME’s prosper with clients much better.

It makes ONE team with an objective to delivery software fully to the customer. So DevOps becomes the need of the hour for an organisation aiming to stay ahead of the competition. Get in touch with us if you would like to implement DevOps within your organisation or simply need any consultation or advice on it.

Security during development A Wise or Otherwise Decision

Web application security, cyber theft and cyber ransom are some of the most trending security topics in the internet these days. Despite the large number of antivirus companies and security professional out there, still the approach towards this is reactive and this common trend is indicating that the engagement of offensive security mind-set needs an increase of several magnitudes.

All security attacks pose risk to the business and risk can be mitigated with awareness and it holds good for security incidence also. When software developers get education on security which intern enables them to detect and protect their application in advance, when this happens to some extent application can be marked as protected. Though definition of Protected application is the matter of debate in security community as the how protected application is depends on who is attacking and who essentially is providing the protection. Real security would be implemented completely only when developers will be involved from the step one. Without the actual workforce involvement our assumption of having vulnerability free software systems seems very unrealistic.

When developers are writing code they are more interested in the problem solving and logical progression, they don’t want to lose the time in deployment process, most of the J2EE certified application servers when they run on development mode, time taken to publish the changes keeps everything on halt. personally have experienced this in WebLogic, WebSphere. In reality businesses exist to make money, none of them exist specifically to maintain security and fortify them with latest security systems.

2 things have been overlooked in the software development industry generally, one thing is the rapid feedback cycle, developers waste lots of time in deploying and executing their code than in coding, unfortunately there are not many products which facilitates real time deployment and security testing, we must admit that there are few but those too are not supported for every platform, these solutions have long way to go. Another problem that I could think of is vulnerability detection at the time of software development. These things are really fundamental to secure software development cycle and most importantly they should be open and free. Open source community needs to put some serious thought on this area which I feel is overlooked from long time.

Having the development time security detection not only reduces the cost and saves time but it also infuses security vulnerability awareness among developers. Lack of security specific understanding among developers is growing concern of product managers, additionally it enhances time to market your product.

Once we are successful in infusing this thought of writing secure code into the mind of developers, cost of security testing and remediation would eventually become negligible. Training programs that promote this goal will help us realize the positive outcomes shortly. All of sudden making them mandatory might sound like an order and creating compliance verses engagement problem. Management should handle this problem carefully. Initiatives which are started with sole aim of promoting secure coding practices should be fun to learn and implement. This seems the only way of achieving cent per cent security in software development cycle.

Bottom line is run time security issue detection and rapid feedback cycle is the demand of hour and software industry and open source community need to come up with serious plan of implementing and building frameworks where secure coding practices can foster and result into protracted software systems.