Introducing the Connected Experience Cloud, Plus Other Highlights from Activate 2020

Activate 2020 kicked off with keynotes from executives at Lenovo, Forrester, Morgan Stanley, and Salesforce this morning along with Lucidworks CEO Will Hayes. This year’s keynote program focused on how to improve customer and employee experiences through search, AI and personalization and set the stage for over 30 talks, ask me anything sessions, and a great day of networking with some of the leaders in search and AI.

Keynote Highlights

Lucidworks CEO Will Hayes opened this year’s virtual conference by introducing Connected Experience Cloud (CXC), a purpose-built system (comprised of Lucidworks Fusion and other Lucidworks products) that captures insights from every action and applies them to the next, empowering everyone, and breaking down insight silos everywhere.

“With Connected Experience Cloud we’re capturing signals from every user action, making those insights available to any workflow, empowering individuals in the moment, and breaking down silos to create a delightful and productive experience for users.”

Lenovo’s Marc Desormeau, Product Owner for Site Search and Product Data Optimization, focused on how AI-powered search has contributed to a dramatic increase in customer engagement and conversion worldwide. Learn more about Lenovo’s journey on Fusion here. 

“Fusion gives us a vehicle that provides quantifiable and measurable ways to improve our connection with our customers, really understanding the different ways they engage with the site and being present in a way that’s relevant to them where they need us and when they need us.”

Faith Adams, Forrester Sr. Analyst Serving CX Professionals, delivered a keynote focused on the keys to CX success to transform an organization.

“By unifying your Voice of Customer efforts and creating that bigger picture view of your experience you’re no longer inundating your customers with feedback requests. You’re able to get to a better level of the right insights.”

Morgan Stanley’s Dipendra Malhotra, Head of Analytics, Intelligence and Data Technology for Wealth Management, described how AI-powered search relevance dissembles insight siloes to leverage the same content for channels used by clients and financial advisors. Dipendra shared an overview of how they create content once and leverage it across many teams and channels.

“Where machine learning comes into play is understanding the user intent from past questions, the user intent from the path they took to come to that question, and the user intent from the products they hold to get to the point where you really understand the question and can provide the best answer.”

The morning finished with Jake Mannix, Search Relevance Architect at Salesforce, sharing a list of what is required for search engines to get a “seat at the table” of user’s highly divided attention.

“To maximize business value in a search driven flow, you have to predict with as much accuracy as possible what your users will do after querying you. The best way to get them to do more of what they want is to have a good idea of what they do given what you show them.”

Lucidworks Product Updates

• Lucidworks Kubernetes Service (LKS): Radu Miclaus, Director of Product, AI and Cloud Services announced LKS to offload the operational burden of running Fusion as a Kubernetes application in data centers or public cloud instances. Learn more about LKS here.
• Smart Answers Integration with DialogFlow: Amit Kumar, Google Solution Consultant, Cloud AI, and Steven Mierop, Lucidworks Sales Engineer announced that Google DialogFlow and Lucidworks Fusion’s Smart Answers have joined capabilities to provide users a best in class conversational solution using AI-powered speech to text, powerful dialog flow design, and AI-powered semantic search for an impactful self-service experience.
• Fusion Upgrades: Tik Patel, Director of Product, shared recent upgrades to Fusion that allow customers to maximize their data science investment and reduce time to value, including Smart Answers for enriched chatbots, Predictive Merchandiser for ecommerce, and new recommender jobs.
• Predictive Merchandiser Landing Pages: Tom Allen, Director of Commerce Applications, demonstrated how the upgrades to Predictive Merchandiser now empower merchandisers to quickly build out landing pages and curate the search experience.

Interested in learning more about how Lucidworks is building connected experiences for the world’s largest organizations? Contact us today.

Further reading on the business benefits of cloud computing.