New AI-powered bot provides customers and employees with smart digital assistants from any conversational interface – from Facebook Messenger to Alexa and beyond

Pegasystems Inc. (NASDAQ: PEGA), the software company empowering customer engagement at the world’s leading enterprises, today launched Pega® Intelligent Virtual Assistant, an artificial intelligence (AI) powered bot that easily turns applications into smart assistants on any channel – from SMS and email to Facebook, Alexa, Slack, and more. Pega evolves bots from simple chat and data fetching novelties into sophisticated digital agents that anticipate people’s needs, make helpful suggestions, complete complex tasks, and provide exceptional experiences.

Despite the hype, today’s chatbots and virtual assistants don’t provide the human-like experiences they’ve been promised to deliver. Customers and employees are left with one-dimensional interactions in stilted language that perform only the simplest of tasks and add little value. According to Pega’s new global survey on AI, only 20 percent of consumers prefer chat-based customer service, and 80 percent still want a live human typing on the other end. Meanwhile, developers struggle to build and manage even more bots for the latest channels and establish a connected experience between them all.

Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant – part of the Pega® Platform – overcomes these shortfalls by elegantly extending any Pega enterprise application to any conversational interface. It turns these channels into intelligent assistants that make personalized customer service and real work possible using natural language in voice or text. This makes bots more intelligent, useful, and gratifying for customers and employees to use in a variety of scenarios, such as:

• A banking bot alerts a customer checking her balance on Alexa to a suspicious charge, opens a charge dispute, and orders her a new card – all in the same session using natural language.
• A mobile service provider bot helps a subscriber on Facebook Messenger understand why he went over his data limit, suggests a plan better suited for his lifestyle, and immediately activates it so he can continue to stream the big game.
• A company’s internal IT helpdesk bot helps an employee diagnose a laptop problem with a series of questions, opens a ticket with the IT staff, and seamlessly connects her to a helpdesk staff member if the issue becomes overly complex.

With decades of customer engagement and operational efficiency technology experience, Pega provides the most complete bot solution in the market by uniquely combining:

• AI with predictive analytics and decisioning that senses user need and offers the right solution at the right moment for a hyper-personalized experience.
• Natural language processing (NLP) and text analytics that make it intuitive for people to engage in the same way that they normally speak or type.
• A unified architecture that enables people to seamlessly move from one channel to the next – including from a bot to a human agent if needed – and pick up exactly where they left off.
• A code-free development environment that makes it easy for any business user to configure, simulate, and manage the bot to achieve their business goals.
• Case Management and Business Process Management (BPM) that drive work behind the scenes to make conversational UX (user experiences) more useful, practical, and functional.

Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant comes preconfigured to extend to Facebook Messenger, Alexa, and Google Home. Business users can easily build their own extenders to other popular messaging apps such as WeChat and Skype, as well as business collaboration apps such as Slack and Yammer. Organizations can test their bots with an integrated simulator in the native interface, ensuring the virtual assistant responds as intended before it goes live.

Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant is available today as a key capability of the Pega Platform, Pega’s market-leading model-driven application development environment. It can extend most Pega applications – including CRM apps for marketing, sales, and customer service and any custom-built Pega apps – with conversational UX functionality. The Pega® Customer Decision Hub provides the virtual assistant with AI power to analyze information, anticipate needs, and make optimal decisions.