Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - An update from Amelia

Artificial intelligence is becoming more human. At least, that's what Andrew Windle, Vice President and General Manager for Australia and New Zealand at Amelia, wants people to understand as he steers his company's push into the rapidly evolving world of conversational AI.

Amelia, an intelligent automation firm with more than 25 years' experience, is determined to stake its claim as a leader in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region with technology designed to make machines feel less like robots and more like genuine collaborators. Having established its headquarters in New York and built out offices in Sydney, Amelia is focused on embedding itself locally while leveraging decades of global expertise.

"We're an intelligent automation company," Windle said, stressing the sophisticated nature of what Amelia offers. "For us, it's really about thinking about the intelligent AI that we put into our products." He explained that while old chatbots offered simple interactions, Amelia's solutions sit "at the top right quadrant in terms of our conversational AI," thanks to developments that allow dynamic, context-aware dialogue.

Amelia's origins are rooted in automation for major industries, including working with banks and insurers in the US to streamline complex systems. This foundation creates what Windle calls "AI Ops work," enabling companies to "automate their back end systems" at scale.

Asked what sets Amelia apart in a crowded field, Windle pointed to the "human-like conversation" that underpins its technology. "Our catch cry is that we're the most human AI," he declared. "If you can imagine us sitting on a contact centre for a company or as part of an employee experience, it's really important to have that real human experience."

Windle detailed how Amelia's AI can process complex conversations, switching intent and remembering context - much as a real person would. Using an example from the insurance industry, he illustrated how Amelia can listen to a customer request involving several nuanced data points and process it all seamlessly, rather than robotically prompting for information. "It's really about being able to do things asynchronously, being able to understand the intent of the conversations and then move through," he added.

The company claims deep industry expertise, with AI modules tailored to sectors such as insurance, government, healthcare, telecommunications, and banking. Windle emphasised the importance of this specialisation. "We're actually building building AI modules that allow us to have a very strong understanding within that industry," he said, noting that generative AI is now a priority. "Everyone thinks it's just started - it's been there for a long time."

One future-defining trend, Windle suggested, is "AI building AI". The platform now learns from conversations, creating new automation flows without requiring painstaking manual input from programmers. "The AI is doing it itself," he said.

However, for Windle, business process orchestration is the key differentiator, especially when traditional backend systems are complex and fragmented. "What happens as we all know, at the back end there's five or six different systems that need to be examined. That's where we see ourselves as market leading," he revealed.

Despite the technology's promise, Windle observed that Australia has been slower to embrace AI than regions like Europe and the US. "Some of those early years there was not a lot of understanding of the capabilities of the AI," he explained. Early chatbots were often clunky and unimpressive, leaving businesses sceptical about their value. "Globally now, we've been steady state in the US and Europe for a long time and what that allows us is to leverage those regions to be able to bring the capability over into Australia," he added.

Australia's relatively small market size and limited competition, he noted, have also delayed adoption. But the COVID-19 pandemic proved a disruptive force, forcing firms to rethink how they engaged customers in a world where "our Australian and New Zealand communities were actually taken care of even if we didn't have humans sitting in offices."

The tide may be turning. According to Windle, "Conversational AI in Australia and New Zealand specifically was growing in 2023 and 24 at 37%." This rapid growth, he said, demands careful implementation and partnerships built on trust.

Looking forward, Windle believes generative AI presents the biggest opportunity for the local market. "Generative AI is an area where if you go ahead and do or implement generative AI, I think you're going to get a response out of your customers and your employees which… is going to be a positive one," he said. The challenge, he added, lies in "how to leverage that investment to be able to take it further".

In a country with a small workforce, intelligent automation becomes even more valuable. "AI gives us that opportunity to be able to think about, you know, what we can actually leverage the capability of conversational AI and generative AI to be able to allow us to do more than we were able to do with a far smaller workforce," Windle explained.

He argued that AI implementations can scale in ways that human teams cannot. As an example, Windle pointed to Amelia's work with a telecommunications provider in Peru, comparable in size to the largest telcos in Australia, where Amelia's system handles "every call of seven million a month" as the digital front door. "She processes a lot of those in the background itself so you can see the scale," he said.

By overlaying AI on top of existing systems, Windle believes companies can "switch your asset for longer by putting the AI over the top and not having to make that expensive change." For those yet to commit, he warned there would be "winners and laggards in the industry".

Asked why some clients have embraced AI while others have not, Windle suggested it comes down to recognising urgent business problems - from reducing long wait times to expediting orders. "All these problems at the end of the day are creating some competitive tension within companies that probably weren't there a number of years ago," he observed.

For cautious companies, Windle urged taking bold first steps: "If you're going to deploy the technology, do something that has a meaningful impact that you can show your board, to your executive, because if you can do that what ends up happening is people can see tangible outcome in that first phase."

Ultimately, Windle is confident that those prepared to take the leap with AI will find the rewards well worth the risk. "The companies that are prepared to take that opportunity will ultimately reap the benefit," he said.