Stefanini Invests in AI and Reinforces Sophie’s Capabilities

The world’s premier corporate artificial intelligence agent Sophie has the ability to handle high-demand environments

Stefanini, a $1B global IT provider, announced today that the company is reinforcing its investments in Sophie, an artificial intelligence platform with the ability to turn data into valuable solutions.  Fully developed within Stefanini’s research and development labs, Sophie is the world’s premier corporate artificial intelligence agent, built to handle high-demand environments by the people who understand them best.

The AI agent Sophie is based on cognitive computing and artificial intelligence, with a focus in self-adaptation, interactive and contextual automation that enables self-learning, human-like interactions and self-healing automation capabilities; she can assist with tasks such as triggering workflow, auto escalation, presenting knowledge to users and many more.

According to Fabio Caversan, P&D Director at Stefanini , there are two main approaches to AI. The first, called “connectionist,” emulates the brain, identifying signals, patterns and symbols. In the AI community, such an approach is replicated through the deep neural networks algorithm.  The second approach, called “symbolic,” tries to emulate the mind, with symbols and significance, not necessarily connected to patterns but to meaning.  “What makes Sophie so strong is that it combines both approaches into one powerful mind,” said Mr. Fabio Caversan.

Using this hybrid approach, Sophie can understand concepts and relationships.  Stefanini’s AI platform has the ability to understand the meaning of words and phrases and relate them to the real world.  “Sophie learns at a faster pace and can be implemented in a shorter period of time than any other tool in the market, and she was designed for complex, high-demand environments.  Sophie thinks using the symbolic process, which leads to a faster learning process, as well as better conversational skills and user comprehension,” Mr. Caversan affirmed.

Unique Applications for Call Centers

Artificial intelligence systems can be used in various applications to automate repetitive tasks that are currently being performed by humans.  One of the services that has experienced benefits from this technology for some time now is the call center, with the substitution of virtual stations for physical agents.  “Contact centers and customer service centers will gain huge advantages in efficiency with automation and augmentation of human labor.  Today, the majority of in-person and online customer service interactions are carried out through self-service applications,” said Mr. Caversan.

Sophie uses common knowledge networks—three million related words, as an initial installation without any training effort, and a global collaborative archive that relates human concepts—to enable Sophie to get to the bottom of a question.  Easily extensible, integration is part of Sophie’s DNA.  “Our AI platform was also designed to connect legacy systems, ITSM tools, CRM, ERP and more, offering an end-to-end, single-screen experience that will amaze the end user.  The ability to load data more quickly into the AI platform is one aspect that makes us unique,” said Mr. Caversan.