Deloitte and IPsoft to customise AI agent Amelia for Australian market

Deloitte and IPsoft have signed an agreement to further develop IPsoft's cognitive platform Amelia in Australia.

In July, Deloitte announced a partnership with IPsoft to roll out two of IPsoft's products to its US clients: Amelia, an AI platform similar to Amazon's Alexa, and IPcenter, an autonomic IT management platform.

The companies will now be customising the Amelia platform for the Australian market.

Often compared to Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, Amelia is is touted as more expressive than her AI peers.

Alan Marshall, Deloitte's Analytics and Cognitive Technology practice leader, said Amelia has a unique natural language processing capability that means she can engage in dialogues just like humans.

"Best of all, Amelia can do this at machine speed while holding thousands of conversations in parallel," Marshall said.

He added that Amelia's ability to improve service as well as efficiency will have an impact on productivity.

"Our clients are under pressure to find new pathways to growth that will enable them to remain competitive," Marshall said.

"The emergence of the robotic workforce, like that provided by Amelia, is a really exciting opportunity for Australian business to automate its process execution and transform its service interaction models."

Deloitte's Australian clients could potentially adopt the technology across verticals such as financial services, health, education, and telecommunications. Marshall said Deloitte is also seeing "significant" activity in mining and oil and gas.

The NSW Innovation Strategy report states 40 percent of today's jobs will not exist in 10 to 15 years, and 60 percent of the best jobs in the next 10 years have yet to be invented.

Rather than robots replacing humans, humans can be transferred into other areas of business.

"Enterprises across all sectors are keen to leverage cognitive technology to augment the workforce so that they can put more energy into enhancing the customer experience," said Justin Cooper, IPsoft Australian vice president.

Accenture formed a similar partnership with IPsoft to deploy Amelia as a virtual agent for sectors like banking, insurance, and travel.

The news comes as Australian-founded conversational commerce startup Flamingo looks to strengthen its position in Australia and the broader Asia-Pacific market, after experiencing traction in the North American market.

Flamingo's "intelligent guided selling platform" combines web chat, web forms, and artificial intelligence to guide customers through their purchasing decisions and help financial services firms address the problem of low online sales conversion rates.