Astute Recognized for Innovative Use of AI in 2020 Artificial Intelligence Breakthrough Awards

Prestigious annual awards program honors Astute’s Crisis Management AI as a standout AI and machine learning solution

COLUMBUS, Ohio–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#ai—Astute, Inc., a leader in customer engagement technology, today announced that it has been selected as the winner of the “Best Transactional Bot Solution” award in the 2020 AI Breakthrough Awards program conducted by AI Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies, and products in the global Artificial Intelligence (AI) market today.

Astute’s AI-driven software allows companies to address the unique challenges of customer engagement while providing effortless customer experiences across channels and devices. Built on Astute’s customer experience chatbot platform, the company’s recently introduced Crisis Management AI solution was specially designed for companies to provide automated, personalized answers in the COVID-19 pandemic environment.

The AI-powered chatbot emerged as fast, responsive, and adaptable, taking an average of only two days to deploy on customers’ websites, apps, SMS, or social channels. The solution is pre-configured to pull data from reliable news sources about COVID-19 and customized by each company with answers to their most common questions. In addition to being used as a crisis communication tool, the same chatbot platform serves as the foundation for Astute’s Employee Health Screening Chatbot, which provides a self-check-in process for employees prior to coming to work. With a few quick questions, developed according to CDC guidelines, the bot evaluates whether employees should stay home due to symptoms or contact with someone who has COVID-19.

“In times of crisis, companies are typically left scrambling to respond to changing directives and shifting consumer demand, making streamlined and clear communication critical,” said Alex George, President and CTO of Astute. “Instead of customer service teams becoming overwhelmed with consumer inquiries about everything from company policies, hours and product availability, refunds and more, our AI-powered platform steps in to communicate quickly and consistently with customers and employees on all channels during these times of constant change.”

Astute has also recently launched additional tools to enable companies to navigate the rapid changes brought on by COVID-19, including their Email Virtual Assistant (EVA), which automates customer email management to help call centers to handle massive spikes in customer questions due to the pandemic. The company’s latest Voice of the Customer (VoC) offering, Customer Confidence, helps businesses assess customers’ level of comfort with returning in-person to their locations, enabling them to forecast revenue and plan resources.

The mission of the AI Breakthrough Awards is to honor excellence and recognize the innovation, hard work, and success in a range of AI and machine learning related categories, including AI platforms, Deep Learning, Smart Robotics, Business Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, industry-specific AI applications and many more. This year’s program attracted more than 2,750 nominations from over 15 different countries throughout the world.

“AI correctly deployed in the customer experience has the ability to serve as an information powerhouse,” said James Johnson, managing director, AI Breakthrough. “Astute has executed on this potential and we congratulate the whole team at Astute for their well-deserved industry recognition and AI Breakthrough Award. We look forward to continued breakthrough innovation from Astute in the years to come.”

Key features of the Crisis Management AI include escalation to a live agent, text-back capabilities, reports that track throughput, activity, and conversation-based analytics and the ability to reach back out to consumers proactively when information changes. The Crisis Management AI can also be configured to search multiple sources of information and knowledge bases, as well as handle a much larger set of use cases and actions.

Learn more about Astute’s Crisis Management AI solution.

About Astute

Astute is a full-service end-to-end customer engagement platform for the world’s largest global brands. Astute unifies all first-party data across the customer journey, offering AI-driven customer self-service, agent desktop CRM, social media management, and powerful Voice of the Customer (VoC) tracking and analytics. No matter how customers choose to engage, Astute elevates the interaction while capturing invaluable first-party data to improve the journey. Winner of the 2020 Stevie® Award for Most Innovative Tech Company and CUSTOMER Magazine’s 2020 Contact Center Technology Award, Astute’s commitment to innovating the customer experience is well-recognized in the market. Learn more at astutesolutions.com.

About AI Breakthrough

Part of Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for global technology innovation and leadership, the AI Breakthrough Awards program is devoted to honoring excellence in Artificial Intelligence technologies, services, companies and products. The AI Breakthrough Awards provide public recognition for the achievements of AI companies and products in categories including AI Platforms, Robotics, Business Intelligence, AI Hardware, NLP, Vision, Biometrics and more. For more information visit AIBreakthroughAwards.com.