Calling the AI Marketing Bluff

Can you imagine if, 15 years ago, Nexidia, Nuance Communications, CallMiner and even the old eLoyalty & Mattersight Corporation (also a NICE acquisition) would have been branding everything as “AI”?

I was a big fan of the original NICE Nexidia speech analytics technology when Nexidia was bringing it to market 15 years ago (long before their acquisition). They built some pretty compelling stuff and we’re really the first Agent Assistant (as we call it today). In fact, one of my disappointments was that I didn’t get a partnership done with them and Cisco before I left in 2011.

But can you imagine if, 15 years ago, Nexidia, Nuance Communications, CallMiner and even the old eLoyalty & Mattersight Corporation (also a NICE acquisition) would have been branding everything as “AI”? We all would have rolled our eyes and called their bluff.

We’ve seen significant and exciting breakthroughs in Machine Learning and large language models since that time, but why on earth are vendors now hawking everything as AI and acting like they invented this stuff to the confusion of customers?

Let’s agree to call it what it is. Machine Learning speech-to-text that makes it more accurate, faster and cheaper.