SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Activate, Lucidworks’ annual Search and AI conference, featured keynote speakers from Lenovo, Forrester, Morgan Stanley, and Salesforce this morning along with Lucidworks CEO Will Hayes. This year’s keynote program focused on how to improve customer and employee experiences through search, AI and personalization.
Keynote Highlights
Lucidworks CEO Will Hayes opened this year’s virtual conference by introducing Connected Experience Cloud (CXC), a purpose-built system (comprised of Lucidworks Fusion and other Lucidworks products) that captures insights from every action and applies them to the next, empowering everyone, and breaking down insight silos everywhere. Hayes explained: “With Connected Experience Cloud we're capturing signals from every user action, making those insights available to any workflow, empowering individuals in the moment, and breaking down silos to create a delightful and productive experience for users.”
Lenovo’s Marc Desormeau, Product Owner for Site Search and Product Data Optimization, focused on how AI-powered search has contributed to a dramatic increase in customer engagement and conversion worldwide. Desormeau shared: “Fusion gives us a vehicle that provides quantifiable and measurable ways to improve our connection with our customers, really understanding the different ways they engage with the site and being present in a way that's relevant to them where they need us and when they need us."
Faith Adams, Forrester Sr. Analyst Serving CX Professionals, delivered a keynote focused on the keys to CX success to transform an organization. “By unifying your Voice of Customer efforts and creating that bigger picture view of your experience you’re no longer inundating your customers with feedback requests,” said Adams. “You’re able to get to a better level of the right insights.”
Morgan Stanley’s Dipendra Malhotra, Head of Analytics, Intelligence and Data Technology for Wealth Management, described how AI-powered search relevance dissembles insight siloes to leverage the same content for channels used by clients and financial advisors. Dipendra shared an overview of how they create content once and leverage it across many teams and channels, explaining, “Where machine learning comes into play is understanding the user intent from past questions, the user intent from the path they took to come to that question, and the user intent from the products they hold to get to the point where you really understand the question and can provide the best answer.”
The morning finished with Jake Mannix, Search Relevance Architect at Salesforce, sharing a list of what is required for search engines to get a "seat at the table" of user's highly divided attention. “To maximize business value in a search driven flow, you have to predict with as much accuracy as possible what your users will do after querying you,” explained Mannix. “The best way to get them to do more of what they want is to have a good idea of what they do given what you show them.”
Lucidworks Updates
- Lucidworks Kubernetes Service (LKS): Radu Miclaus, Director of Product, AI and Cloud Services announced LKS to offload the operational burden of running Fusion as a Kubernetes application in data centers or public cloud instances.
- Smart Answers Integration with DialogFlow: Amit Kumar, Google Solution Consultant, Cloud AI, and Steven Mierop, Lucidworks Sales Engineer announced that Google DialogFlow and Lucidworks Fusion’s Smart Answers have joined capabilities to provide users a best in class conversational solution using AI-powered speech to text, powerful dialog flow design, and AI-powered semantic search for an impactful self-service experience.
- Fusion Upgrades: Tik Patel, Director of Product, shared recent upgrades to Fusion that allow customers to maximize their data science investment and reduce time to value, including Smart Answers for enriched chatbots, Predictive Merchandiser for ecommerce, and new recommender jobs.
- Predictive Merchandiser Landing Pages: Tom Allen, Director of Commerce Applications, demonstrated how the upgrades to Predictive Merchandiser now empower merchandisers to quickly build out landing pages and curate the search experience.
Interested in learning more about how Lucidworks is building connected experiences for the world’s largest organizations? Contact us today.
About Activate Search & AI Conference
The Activate Conference brings together the brightest minds in search, AI, data science, and analytics from innovative organizations creating rich digital experiences. Activate is organized by Lucidworks and began in 2010 as Lucene Revolution, which grew into Lucene/Solr Revolution, an event dedicated to bringing together the Apache Solr open source community. As search continued to converge with AI and related technologies, the event relaunched as Activate in 2018 with an expanded program including both open source Apache Solr and complementary technologies at the intersection of Search and AI. Learn more at Activate-conf.com.
About Lucidworks
Lucidworks builds AI-powered search solutions for many of the world's largest brands. Fusion, Lucidworks' advanced development platform, provides the enterprise-grade capabilities needed to design, develop, and deploy intelligent search applications at any scale. Companies across all industries, from consumer retail and healthcare to insurance and financial services, rely on Lucidworks every day to power their consumer-facing and enterprise search apps. Lucidworks’ investors include Francisco Partners, TPG Sixth Street Partners, Top Tier Capital Partners, Shasta Ventures, Granite Ventures, and Walden International. Learn more at Lucidworks.com.
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