-GAVS Tech’s ZIF platform prevents 50 to 80 cyberattacks per day for major NYC hospital 
-Zero Incident Framework improves doctor-patient relationships by increasing productivity and decreasing technological disturbances
-Award-winning artificial intelligence helps organizations become incident-free

About GAVS Technologies

GAVS Technologies is a global IT services provider committed to improving user experience and reducing resource utilization by bringing meaningful, actionable insights to speed up network fixes and by providing real data as quantifiable justification to adopt strategies that foster business improvements. GAVS’ primary focus is their new platform, Zero Incident Framework (ZIF), which enables proactive detection and remediation of incidents and increases uptime, helping organizations drive toward a Zero Incidents Enterprise. 

Zero Incident Framework

ZIF is an award-winning artificial intelligence based technology operations (AIOps) tool developed by GAVS Technologies, powered by advanced patent-pending machine learning techniques including AI-based predictive analytics, BOT-based remediation, and monitoring and virtualized desktop infrastructure that could be deployed individually or as an integrated solution. 

ZIF Improves Doctor-Patient Relationships

GAVS’ ZIF platform was implemented at BronxCare Health System, which is the largest voluntary, non-profit health and teaching hospital system serving the South and Central Bronx. They have infused more than $300 million into the Bronx economy through various capital projects including their Health and Wellness Center for outpatient care and their Life Recovery Center for chemical dependency services. BronxCare Health System is among the largest and busiest providers of outpatient services in New York City, with more than one million visits annually. 

The hospital deals with 100 different vendors, and they had approximately 50 to 80 direct cyberattacks every day. The target availability of infrastructure and systems was around 99.99%. The need for high availability, greater precision of prediction, IT infrastructure, mission-critical application support, and a cost-effective solution was imperative given their deep reach and incredible service to the community.

GAVS Technologies' ZIF platform was selected as part of the hospital’s digitalization journey for end-to-end IT managed services and operations analytics. ZIF enabled proactive detection and remediation of incidents, helping the system drive toward high availability. Implementing this technology helped the hospital to move from a reactive model to a proactive, preventive, predictive, and prescriptive model of governance with almost 80% accuracy. With the recent adoption of AIOPs, the hospital has disrupted the clinical operations in a positive way - they’ve enhanced the patient experience with the doctors by being able to spend longer time together. Previously, doctors had to spend more than half of their very short consultation time feeding in information onto the system (usually 6 out of their 10 minutes were spent entering patient data into the system). Further, the implementation of AI for malware threat detection has improved the hospital’s overall cyber-secure environment. 

The improved productivity not only served to uphold the name BronxCare Health System has built for themselves, but it also helped increase revenue realization due to more handling capability. ZIF’s contribution to the BronxCare Health System not only stands as a testament to GAVS’ innovative work in AIOps, but also to their commitment and perseverance in serving the community.

Recent ZIF and Bronxcare Accomplishments 

• Moved operations from a reactive model to a proactive model, thus preventing outages and data disasters 
• Achieved 80% accuracy with system learning continuously through Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
• Increased time spent with patients up to 50%
• Increased revenue realisation due to more handling capacity
• Enhanced resource planning
• Prevented 50 to 80 cyberattacks per day

Siri, the artificial intelligence assistant of Apple, is impressive. She is sassy, efficient, and articulate. She is also the result of thousands of hours put in by hundreds of people who are experts in language, machine learning, and software development. When you see the end results of some of the most extensive AI projects, it’s easy to believe AI is replacing humans, but that is far from true.

Harvard Business Review researched 1,500 companies that implemented AI to automate processes. They found that businesses only reap the true long-term benefits of AI when humans and machines work together; companies that deploy AI in the hopes of displacing employees only see short-term productivity gains.

Standing on the Shoulders of Humans
AI is not a stand-alone product. It needs to be trained to perform tasks, educated about the outcomes, and regularly maintained and updated. Millions of people around the globe earn their livings by teaching AI to make diagnostic decisions, to identify images, to recognize speech, and more. Has a website ever asked you to prove you are human by choosing the images that contain a certain street sign? If you filled in one of these image captchas, you were, in a way, teaching Google’s AI to identify that street sign.

Virtual support bots are one of the most common usages of AI today. One such example is Aida, a virtual assistant used by SEB, a bank headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. Aida is trained to understand and to handle natural language conversations in order to answer customer queries. In about 30 percent of instances, the virtual system fails to resolve the issue, and it passes on the call to a human customer experience (CX) rep. It then monitors this human interaction and learns from it.

Complementing Each Other
What comes naturally to humans (reading complex facial expressions, creating art, making jokes, understanding implied meanings, and more) is not easy for machines. What’s easy for machines (such as crunching tons of data and doing repetitive tasks for months on end, for example) is practically impossible for people to accomplish. Through smartly executed collaboration, AI and humans can complement their respective skill sets to help businesses scale faster and better.

These things are no secret, of course. More instances of human experts powering AI are now seen worldwide. Directly, a support automation company based in San Francisco, California, United States, is one example. The company helps enterprises launch and train virtual agents. Their platform has human experts from all walks of life training CX AI agents for numerous enterprise companies, including Microsoft, SAP, LinkedIn, and Samsung. The human experts feed training phrases and intent to the company’s support AI, create authentic content the AI can use to automatically answer queries, and provide live assistance when needed.

“When the expertise of human workers is systemically injected into the AI system, AI becomes more accurate and paves the way for continued coexistence,” says Antony Brydon, co-founder and VP of Platform at Directly. “Since AI will rely on the expertise of human workers to be successful, there’s no danger of people training themselves out of jobs because the AI systems need constant maintenance. And because the more input from domain experts an AI receives, the better it becomes, the demand for workers to train AI will only grow.”

Directly won the Bronze Stevie® Award in the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Solution subcategory of the Product Management & New Product Awards category at The 2019 and 2020 American Business Awards® .

Interested in entering The American Business Awards?

In an age where AI is changing the business landscape, agencies like Digital Resource are stepping up to help organizations gain online traction. Adopting AI can mean creating personal connections between businesses and clients.

Hollywood’s dire predictions of artificial intelligence (AI) taking over the world might not be coming true any time soon, but there’s no denying that AI’s capabilities are revolutionizing many industries. With newfound access to big data, machine learning, and in-depth insight into consumer behavior, the marketing industry, for one, is undergoing a complete overhaul.

Most businesses today have the wrong idea about online marketing. It is not so much about the tools and platforms you use as it is about understanding human behavior and motivation. The deeper your knowledge of your target audience, the more impactful your marketing efforts will be. To that end, AI is a powerful ally for marketers who are willing to accept and to adapt to its capabilities.

AI for Your Marketing Team

Businesses across the world are using AI and machine learning insights to sharpen their marketing focus and to increase personalization. For instance, AI can help create ads that convert better by enabling deeper keyword searches, social profiling, and exhaustive online data research—all of which are not scalable efforts when done manually.

Intelligent analysis of search patterns, conversational chatbots to increase retention, individual-level user analytics, and several other marketing use cases of AI are all emerging globally.

“Marketing initially scared me because you couldn’t measure it,” said Susan Johnson, CMO of SunTrust Bank, in a conversation on AI with John Koetsier of Inc.

“I never thought we'd be here, where technology and marketing are completely intertwined,” said Johnson, who trained as an engineer and worked at Apple before making the shift to marketing. “Now, with technology, we have some degree of certainty about what is happening and why.”

This sentiment echoes the thoughts of savvy marketers everywhere.

AI Adoption and Marketing Impact in Numbers

Recent research and survey reports reveal the pace at which AI is changing the marketing landscape. For example, according to the Digital Intelligence Briefing, 2018 by Adobe, top-performing companies are more than twice as likely to be using AI for marketing (28 percent versus 12 percent) and Marketers' adoption of AI has grown at a rate of 44 percent since 2017 from the State of Marketing, 5th Edition, Salesforce Research.

Change Is Good

Stevie-winner Digital Resource, which is based in West Palm Beach, Florida, United States, is a full-service Internet marketing agency that works with businesses looking to gain online traction. Started in 2014 by Shay Berman, who was twenty-two at the time, the agency aims to go beyond vanity metrics and to give businesses unfiltered, measurable results. With that goal in mind, they have been quick to explore and to implement AI in their marketing campaigns for clients.

“We're very interested in the introduction of artificial intelligence. While many are afraid AI will take jobs, we're exploring ways we can use it to complement and to optimize our employees,” says Emily Crieghton, a multimedia specialist at Digital Resource. “We're going to see a big uptick in the use of AI. On the flip side, though, we're also going to see companies striving to create more personal connections between businesses, influencers, and online users. So, we'll be working to find a balance between the two.”

Whatever the eventual specifics of AI’s incorporation into business marketing strategies, one thing is clear. Artificial intelligence has arrived, and marketers need to adapt quickly and to harness its potential in order to meet customer expectations and to drive business growth.

This year, Berman won the Silver Stevie® Award in the Entrepreneur of the Year - Advertising, Marketing, & Public Relations category at The seventeenth annual American Business Awards®.

Interested in entering the next American Business Awards?

Customer experience (CX) has undergone a huge transformation over the last few years, and that’s largely because technology has led to rapid advances in the way consumers are engaged and served. CXOne, a platform created by NICE inContact, enables brands to adopt new innovations and improve overall operations.

Virtual chatbots, artificial intelligence, cloud-based contact centers, and data-driven personalizations are no longer novelties. Businesses are working overtime to make their processes agile enough to serve customers’ demands for multichannel, real-time service. Does this mean the beginning of the end of legacy customer service systems?

“It’s no secret that customer satisfaction leads to customer advocacy and loyalty,” says Heather Hughes, senior corporate communications manager of Stevie-winner NICE inContact, a customer experience company based in Sandy, Utah, United States. “As companies strive to provide excellent CX, we’re seeing advanced technology play a big role in the experience.”

Moving CX to the Cloud: Need and Adoption

Not so long ago, customers needing to resolve issues could only call up business call centers and wait to be assigned to representatives. Today, customers reach out to businesses via a variety of channels, including, but not limited to, social media, voice calls, e-mails, chat, SMS, and video. They’re not happy waiting around either. According to a 2018 Hubspot study, 90 percent of consumers rated an “immediate” response as important or very important when they have customer service queries.

Supporting this multichannel, real-time customer experience demand calls for the quick implementation and seamless integration of new technologies, strategies, and processes into organizations’ existing customer service systems. This entails significant ongoing expenditure and is hardly sustainable, which is why businesses find the alternative of migrating contact centers and their entire CX management to the cloud way more palatable.

According to the State of Customer Experience study, by West Corporation, 39 percent of call centers they surveyed had already migrated to the cloud (as of 2017), and another 53 percent were planning to do so within the next three years (by 2020).

“The speed at which organizations need to perform and to transform continues to accelerate. The ability to adjust course in real time to best serve internal and external audiences is paramount, and it’s best enabled with open cloud platforms,” says Hughes.

CX platforms like CXOne from NICE inContact enable brands to adopt new innovations (e.g., AI and embedded analytics), to deploy service changes quickly, and to consolidate routing and reporting across global operations.

Marrying Technological Innovations and the Human Touch

When businesses think of moving CX to the cloud, investing in virtual chatbots, or personalizing customer interactions, the assumption is the need for human interaction then decreases drastically. That, however, is not true. Technology is simply a suite of tools, and it can’t replace the value and impact of the human touch.

For instance, a January 2019 Forrester study revealed 63 percent of customers are OK with getting service from a chatbot, provided they have the choice to move the conversation to a human if required.

“We believe one-on-one customer interactions have a real and lasting impact on people’s lives,” says Hughes. “It’s a belief that inspires us to relentlessly innovate in the cloud and to find smarter ways to transform one-on-one experiences in order to help contact centers achieve their goals.”

This approach toward customer experience makes CXone from NICE inContact a global leader in cloud contact center software, and it led to a Silver Stevie® win in Product Management & New Products Awards in the Cloud Platform category at the 17th Annual American Business Awards® in 2019.

Interested in entering The American Business Awards this year? The entry deadline is February 12, 2020. 

When it comes to the job landscape of the future, much speculation exists about how emerging technologies will affect those just entering the job market. When people ask the specific question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) is going to be a jobs killer, though, it’s important for young people to realize the answer isn’t a simple yes or no. The latest statistics and studies show it’s less about killing or eliminating jobs and more about evolving them.

How AI Could Affect the Future Job Market

When Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, two Oxford academics, came out with a prediction in 2013 that a staggering 47 percent of US jobs were at risk of automation by the middle of the 2030s, this issue of AI as a jobs killer became a hot topic of discussion. Studies, surveys, and op-eds began pouring in on the topic, and the subsequent findings were significant.

For example, McKinsey Global Institute found that anywhere between 40 million and 160 million women across the globe would potentially need to change jobs by 2030. Why? The clerical work done by secretaries, bookkeepers, and schedulers—jobs which are done by women 72 percent of the time—are especially susceptible to automation.

The salient part of the study, however, was not that these women would need to change jobs; it was that they would likely be transitioning into higher-skilled roles. In this way, AI wasn’t depriving them of jobs. Instead, it was pushing them into more advanced roles—positions that require the expertise, understanding, and skills only humans possess.

Similarly, the World Economic Forum estimates that automation is on pace to displace 75 million jobs by 2022, but it’s also set to create 133 million new ones by that date. In another study, Gartner predicts 2 million AI-related net new jobs by 2025.

With such a complicated issue, however, many potential factors come into play, and just as many studies predict an overall net loss in jobs. Forrester, for one, estimates a 29 percent loss of jobs by 2030 and only a 13 percent job increase to compensate.

While there isn’t general agreement about the potential number of jobs displaced and then created by AI, one thing does seem to be clear: AI will push people away from largely automated jobs into more advanced positions, and this transition will require the new job force to be increasingly agile and able to learn core skills and adapt to new working models.

The Company-Level Response to These Changes

Just as young people entering the job market should be cognizant of the changes technology will likely have on the professional landscape, companies should understand this dynamic as well. To stay relevant, businesses within the technology industry not only need to embrace AI and its potential but invest in training their workforces (established and incoming) to adapt to these new technologies.

“IT is a highly innovative and changing industry, and because of this, we’re reinventing education for the era of AI,” says Andrea Knoche, a first-line analytics leader for a subgroup of International Business Machines (IBM) that’s based in Ehningen, Germany. “We’re making it a priority to prepare young people around the world for the jobs of tomorrow.”

As IBM illustrates, success in a changing technology-based landscape is about balancing the adoption of new technology. A company can’t ignore or dismiss new innovations, but it also must prepare its workers to properly harness the power of those tools.

“Our subgroup of IBM is most interested in moving to a cloud-based environment and utilizing big data technologies and analytics strategies,” says Knoche, “but we understand our workers must be trained and prepared to implement those tools into their jobs. When trained properly, employees can make the available technology work for them to increase their efficiency and effectiveness.”

IBM earned a Bronze Stevie Award in the Information Technology Team of the Year category at The 2020 American Business Awards®. They also won several awards at The 2020 International Business Awards®, including a Gold Stevie for Company of the Year - Business or Professional Services - Large.

Interested in winning a Stevie Award in 2020?