With Ultimate, European business and public sector can now access disruptive AI technologies to improve the efficiency and quality of their customer service, across all languages. With this investment, the European Union aims to consolidate its position as the global hub for natural language AI technology.
Horizon 2020 — driving technology innovation in Europe
Founded in 2014, Horizon 2020 is a flagship project of the European Union that encourages and supports research, technology and innovation-driven businesses. The EU aims to drive economic growth and job creation with an unprecedented amount of funding into new technologies.
A core pillar of Horizon 2020 is industrial leadership. With strategic investments in key technologies, the EU aims to underpin innovation across existing and emerging sectors and to increase the number of innovative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in these sectors.
Artificial intelligence is of particular interest to the EU Commission — the use of AI is expected to increase global GDP by €13TN in the next decade. Within this, language technologies are expected to be a source of clear competitive advantage for the EU, for whom multilingualism is a key cultural cornerstone. In 2017, the EU announced its agenda for ‘Language Technologies for Multilingual Europe’.
Improving millions of working lives around Europe with ultimate.ai
Ultimate fit this profile well, leveraging AI to solve challenges in the customer service industry: where inefficiency and the poor use of technology is hurting millions of working lives around Europe and costing European businesses trillions of euros. Ultimate provides an innovative solution, developed in-house with European expertize in artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing.
Ultimate uses deep neural networks to provide the first fully language-independent artificial intelligence platform for customer service. The overarching goal is to become the world’s leading customer service automation platform. Today, Ultimate serves leading brands and is partnered with major CRM providers including Salesforce, Zendesk, and Freshworks.
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Reetu Kainulainen, CEO of Ultimate is certain:
“Major brands and public sector will transform their operations with ultimate.ai as the intelligence backbone to their customer service centers.”
Ultimate’s three key pillars for improved customer service
1. Automation: Repetitive customer service cases and actions can be automated completely. Businesses and organizations dramatically improve their customer service profitability with savings on a headcount and reduced turnover; deliver multilingual support 24/7; and enhance customer experience, as customer service agents are freed to focus on complex customer queries.
2. Augmentation: AI supports agents by showing them recommended answers in real-time. This gives a significant boost to their speed, productivity, and job satisfaction. And as response times become over 30% faster and answers more consistent, customer satisfaction soars.
3. Analytics: Customer service managers get real-time analytics on customer problems. Businesses can react to issues proactively, which dramatically reduces service costs and improves agility and performance. Customer feedback can also be used to design and upgrade core services, resulting in long-term improvements in efficiency and customer satisfaction. In the public sector, where there is constant pressure to improve services at smaller budgets, this two-fold efficiency impact is crucial.
The deep learning company will use the Horizon 2020 funding to expand their AI research team and to further drive significant growth within the next two years. The progress will be documented and available in Ultimate’s newsroom.