In an interesting move, Pega is enabling customers to connect external AI solutions using Real-Time AI Connectors. These are a collection of API’s that will enable Pega customers to connect into third party AI engines. Initially, Pega has announced three connectors:
- Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine gives access to advanced AI models, including TensorFlow for developing and training deep learning models and XGBoost for gradient-boosted decisions trees. This API is scheduled for availability by the end of Q3 2019.
- Amazon SageMaker provides clients with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models in a fully managed service. This API is scheduled for availability by the end of Q4 2019.
- Google DialogFlow Text Analyzer provides an alternative NLP to building interactive text-based conversations. This allows clients, already using Google NLP skills, to leverage Pega to perform more complex data orchestrations, bringing more utility to chat sessions. This API is available now at this link.
Are there any other AI connectors?
Rob Walker, VP, Decisioning and Analytics, Pegasystems spoke to Enterprise Times at Pegaworld and said it is also working on a connector to the Microsoft AI engine. Walker commented: “Google and Azure will have a lot of predictive analytics, we don’t need to own that. We can apply the algorithm and we measure it like one of our own.”
However, IBM Watson is not in the plans, primarily because of the competition between Pega and IBM. This is in addition to the power open API architecture that Pega already had, that lets customers integrate to OCR and speech to text technologies. They are also able to connect the third party solutions such as Docusign, Cisco Spark/Tropo and Salesforce.
For those customers that see the benefit of integrating IBM Watson Ai with Pega, there are third party solutions available though. One of these is provided by Tray.io. This would enable customers to access the intelligence that IBM Watson has, such as weather data.
The beating heart of AI
If the new connectors are the veins that connect Pega to other AI elements its brain is the Pega Customer Decision Hub. This will enable Pega to intelligently automate the rest of its solutions such as marketing, sales and customer service. Pega is proving that its AI capability is now becoming more than the sum of its parts. In connecting to third party solutions, customers can use the drag and drop capabilities within the Decision hub to create new insights. As Allianz Health CEO Birgit Konig said: “It’s our system of artificial intelligence in claims.”
Walker commented: “It’s such an amazing time to be part of the global AI ecosystem that’s continually testing the limits of what great customer experience looks like. With an open approach to our architecture, Real-Time AI Connectors help bring these advancements to our clients so they can infuse the latest AI algorithms into their proven Pega AI engine.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This announcement came as part of the second day keynote at Pegaworld. It was not mentioned on stage, but Pega issued a press release on day one of Pegaworld. It was also talked about during the press briefing. The announcement is important. It shows Pega’s willingness to embrace the work done by other organizations on AI. While to date those include the major players. It will be interesting to see whether Pega extends that to Salesforce Einstein and other AI engines like SAP Leonardo, Infor Coleman. Will it also connect to smaller AI specific platforms once they have specific capabilities that Pega can extract insights from. Those integrations are likely to be driven by customer demand.
Pega delivers true omni channel communication for customer engagement
