Tech powerhouses DXC and Ivanti have separately partnered with AI-powered software firm Espressive to deliver Barista, an automated virtual support agent that will “bridge the gap for companies with IT worker shortages and also respond to urgent an organization’s IT needs, ”Ivanti President Nayaki Nayyar said.
Espressive was selected by Tysons, Virginia-based solution provider DXC Technology – No. 4 on CRN’s 2021 Solution Provider 500 list– to embed Barista in its Modern Workplace offering that empowers employees and delivers a personalized experience to quickly resolve IT issues.
It has also partnered with Ivanti, the South Jordan, Utah-based automation platform provider, and its Ivanti Neurons automation platform that empowers organizations to discover, manage, secure and serve from the cloud to the edge.
“We automate the tasks that people do every day,” Pat Calhoun, CEO and founder of Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup Espressive, told CRN. “But the magic of what we’re doing is connecting human language to that much automation behind the scenes, because that’s where the complexity lies.”
Barista recognizes 22 languages, with plans to recognize 200 in the future.
Along with the deployment of Barista for DXC customers, it will also be available to DXC’s remote workforce of more than 130,000 employees.
“DXC is committed to helping our customers prioritize the employee experience to achieve new levels of productivity, engagement and collaboration and help win the war for talent,” said Mike McDaniel, president of Modern Workplace at DXC, at CRN. “Employees expect a consumer-like and friction-free technology experience. Barista’s embedding helps us give that consumer such self-help.”
Barista also understands more than 2.5 billion different employee topics and phrases, with seven million added on a monthly basis, said Calhoun, who previously worked at ServiceNow, McAfee and Cisco.
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Along with Ivanti, Calhoun they recognize that the world of service management is moving towards AI and automation.
“Automating IT services enables organizations to address the talent shortage twice, by addressing the IT talent shortage and by improving the digital employee experience-enabling to employees to be productive no matter their location, ”Nayyar told CRN. “It is natural next step to partner with Espressive and provide Ivanti Neurons for digital assistant to our customers to strengthen their digital employee experience. It is important for employees to have the same work experience they have. in their consumer lives and Ivanti Neurons provides 24/7 coverage for all workplaces. ”
Calhoun said there was a 35 percent increase in help desk tickets because of the pandemic.
“We saw a 102 per cent increase in service desk absences as a result of the pandemic,” he said. “All of this resulted in a 68 percent increase in the ticket backlog.”
Barista is the only virtual agent based on an open platform that enables rapid deployment, empowers subject matter experts to take control of their own destiny and delivers a zero-code interface for the vast customization without any effort, according to Calhoun.
“On a platform like Barista, we’ve now changed something that might take an hour or two to become immediate,” he said. “If you think about your own productivity as an employee, your ability to recover right away has a huge financial reward.”
“It’s not about getting what we used to do yesterday and finding a way to support them now, It’s about rethinking how support works,” he added.