Age of Invisible Machines

CHAPTER 6This Journey Has Been Personal

Sequencing technology requires a point of view. Technology that allows anyone to create advanced conversational applications has to focus on being truly useful.

To ensure that the technology remains truly useful, it's essential to keep in mind a few questions. Who is it built for? What problems will users need to solve? How might they employ our solution?

These are the questions that resonate at the core of OneReach.ai, and they represent my point of view on hyperautomation. As you begin your own journey in hyperautomation, the answers to these same questions will form your points of view—and ideally they will be apparent to everyone involved in the project and anyone using the technology and tools.

My first conversational AI platform, Communication Studio G1, was my best guess at how to answer these questions. And since my core leadership team and I have deep roots working in experience design, we knew better than to build strictly around technology—we built around user needs. Through thousands of use cases and tens of thousands of user stories, we learned a lot about what we could be doing better—often learning the hard way, even with examples that seem obvious in hindsight. (For instance, we learned that more syllables aid speech recognition, designs with fewer interactions fare better, and storing contextual data from an interaction can improve future interactions.)

Due to the inherently complex nature of the tasks, the lack of maturity ...