Embracing GenAI at Mitel: Navigating the Next Wave of Innovation

Do you remember the times when businesses adopted the Internet? I’m hesitant to admit that I do. When thinking of those times over 30 years ago, I cannot help but draw parallels with what we are experiencing today as we explore the adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) technology.

When first adopted, the Internet was tapped by individuals from the organizations that developed it: academics, students, technology companies, and some early-adopter techie individuals. Initial adoption allowed access to straightforward first-generation content and first-generation web pages. Businesses salivated around the potential business impact the Internet could bring but weren’t sure how to use it, understand the ROI, or envision the business possibility. Business owners wanted to explore but were concerned about maintaining control against the impacts of precious revenue-generating, pre-internet business processes.

Now, we look at those processes as archaic and inefficient. Who would ever think of going back to manual paper shuffling, processes confirmed by verbal communication, and the people-based workflows of the past? It took for businesses to find something small to start with, experiment, iterate, and find incremental ways to leverage internet technology for business progress.

When Internet-based business models and workflows were developed, we all upskilled our technology capabilities and knowledge. We have evolved to the point where using the Internet in our personal and business lives is as common as breathing air. We are all now constantly connected. 

We face another technological wave of change, and the similarities are evident. GenAI brings an accelerated learning of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that drives tremendous potential. With that potential comes the fear from CIOs of runaway technology that will disrupt profitable workflows and expose businesses to unforeseen costly risks. It maintains control of a company’s most valuable resource, data. It maintains compliance with the privacy of its employees and customers and utilizes GenAI to accelerate business without exposing information to unwanted actors or competitors.  

These are all on the minds of CIOs today. The parallels are evident. It will take time, just as it did with the introduction of the Internet. Businesses must trial, fail, and innovate to a comfortable, acceptable, and profitable utilization for GenAI. Mitel is focused on finding this path.

Mitel’s 50+ Years of Innovation and Counting

Mitel has been innovating in communications and collaboration for over 50 years. We are taking advantage of innovation waves to further our solutions. GenAI presents another opportunity and the AI strategy that allows us to ride that wave of efficiency while ensuring we deliver customer solutions that can be implemented immediately. We are making advancements with GenAI tools, integrating GenAI into our frontline worker interfaces, and finding point solutions that customers can use quickly. We are focused on solutions that enable our customers to maintain control of their data, leverage “private” GPT solutions to utilize the technology, learn behaviors, and build business performance and efficiency. These small GenAI beginnings are the foundations that drive meaningful growth. 

Over the past five years, Mitel has generated significant experience in the AI space, starting with one of the first implementations of AI within our Contact Center solution. As we ride the GenAI wave, we look to our strategic focal areas to provide customer value:

• Vertical solutions for target industries
• Solutions to deliver efficiency gains for frontline workers
• AI implementations via the contact center to frontline workers
• Customer experience agents interacting with customers daily

We’re doing this through the Mitel AI Ecosystem, delivering AI solutions, simple to complex, balanced between solutions developed in-house by Mitel and partners from Mitel’s Solution Alliance Program. All come together to bring solutions to make a difference to your business today. Let’s look at some of these.

Meet the Mitel AI Ecosystem

Agent Assist / Virtual Agent

By now, we are very familiar with AI-based agents in the contact center space. Mitel has used these assistants for years, and now we are making the next evolutionary step with customer experience. In an omnichannel customer experience environment, virtual agents take inbound queues to triage customer inquiries and drive primary responses to questions, handing voice or text contact streams over to agents when clarifications are needed. AI assistants follow voice or text conversations between an agent and a customer, offering suggested resources and links to drive efficiency for the agent. Whether using modern GenAI assistants of CCAI Dialogflow from Google Cloud, we explore how to implement virtual agent and agent assist for your contact center agents today.

Mitel Interaction Recording Insights (MIR) AI

Mitel Interaction Recording powered by ASC is a tremendously powerful call recording solution needed in regulated industries. Mitel has augmented this solution with Open AI evaluation, analysis, and insight reporting generated by AI. This powerful addition to the customer experience solution is next up.  

Vertical Solution Assistants for Hospitality

Mitel offers simple guest services AI assistants that deliver quick local and hotel information from the room or website. When customers request information, the AI Assistant pulls defined Small Language Model (SLM) data sets for quick responses that don’t require external Large Language Model (LLM) datasets and the expense of providing them to deliver effective solutions.  

AI Identification in Telecare Solution

Mitel’s Virtual Care Collaboration System (VCCS) product, designed to effectively bring healthcare patient appointments in a seamless workflow and virtual video-based telecare appointments, employs AI to identify ailments using visual video-based cues. Look out for more exciting AI developments in VCCS. 

How Mitel Partners Benefit from GenAI Integrations

A GenAI assistant can leverage Mitel’s large product and technical documentation dataset to enable our Channel Partners to solve initial support inquiries. This reduces our channel partners' reliance on Mitel’s support staff and accelerates the time it takes to resolve customer problems when things don’t perform as expected.

To complement these solutions, we partner with several leading AI solution providers who each bring a solution that is neatly integrated with Mitel infrastructure:

1. Contact Center AI Chatbots, Chat with Agent Assist, Analytics, Screen Share, and more powered by Talkative: Talkative seamlessly integrates with Mitel's MiContact Center Business and MiVoice Business, providing a comprehensive AI chat solution with capabilities including GenAI chatbots, live chat with AI agent assistance, intelligent routing, video chat, sentiment analysis, and more. With Talkative, your team can deliver personalized, efficient customer service at scale across multiple channels – all inside Mitel. 

2. Customer-led Guest Services Voice Assistants, powered by PolyAI: These AI-powered enterprise voice assistants carry on natural conversations with customers to solve their problems. PolyAI uses customer-led voice assistants to automate everyday customer support transactions. PolyAI voice assistants feel, sound, and speak like humans. Integrated with MiContact Center Business and MiVoice Business UC Communication solutions, PolyAI empowers you to deliver a superhuman customer experience. 

3. Customer-led Engagement, powered by Airmeez: Airmeez Edge AI is a platform that offers benefits, particularly in real-time data processing, privacy, and efficiency. By integrating IVAs, chatbots, and human agent contact center support, you can take advantage of real-time processing, enhanced privacy and security, reduced bandwidth usage, scalability and cost efficiency, improved user experience, and online functionality. These all make Airmeez Edge AI a powerful tool for organizations looking to enhance their operations through intelligent automation and localized data processing. 

4. Virtual Banking Assistants for Financial Organizations, powered by Interface AI: Interface AI provides call center automation and AI assistants for integrated human and AI customer experience solutions, initial response, and staff/agent assist services. Sphere GenAI solutions from Interface AI provide a multimodal ChatGPT-like assistant for financial employees and customers. Interface AI is integrated with MiContact Center Business and MiVoice Business and offers critical integrations to drive your financial service business.

With Mitel’s AI Ecosystem, we can evaluate your business needs, use the data available within your business, enable you to implement GenAI solutions while maintaining control of your business data, and have you leveraging AI solutions within days with simple implementation services available to you. We are starting small with solutions you can take advantage of the big GenAI technology wave. 

Stay tuned for future solutions showing how we implement AI in healthcare, financial services, and hospitality.