A Vertical Focus Is the Key to AI Adoption

My last article examined how constantly changing industry terminology can both boost customer adoption and cause market confusion. As I noted, translating industry vision into practical results is confirmed by highlighting customer use cases that provide clear, measurable returns on investment, such as revenue, employee satisfaction, and customer satisfaction.

As vendors aim to boost adoption, especially of solutions driven by artificial intelligence, success relies on speaking the customer’s language and addressing their specific needs. This focus has been especially fruitful in tailoring solutions directly to the vertical market each customer operates in.

While the contact center industry has been at this since the late 1980s, starting with touch-tone banking, today’s AI capabilities are keys to the kingdom in impactful industry-specific use cases. This, in turn, provides marketing fodder for solution providers.

For instance, focusing on a vertical eliminates a fragmented approach to APIs and integration with key third-party applications integral to an industry, such as EPIC systems in healthcare. In highly regulated industries, built-in rules and workflows mitigate privacy and data residency risks. Industry-focused AI-automated workflows, such as ordering, shipping, tracking, billing, and returns within retail, decrease cost and increase operational efficiencies and customer satisfaction.

It’s Time to Harvest the Low-hanging Fruit

Healthcare and retail are two of the most visible markets that show our progress from touch-tone IVR to advanced agentic AI. Providers have addressed this in several ways: by developing all-in-one, vertical-specific packages, by creating workflows and integrations with industry-specific partners, or by developing industry-specific point solutions that customers can add to bolster existing environments. All approaches offer noteworthy results.

For instance, Talkdesk has gained significant traction with its Talkdesk Experience Clouds, which first debuted in 2022. Backed by teams hired from within each industry, experience clouds are pre-designed with custom workflows and automation, pre-integrated with core industry systems, and pretrained with industry-specific AI. Talkdesk has further refined these solutions for different stakeholders, such as separate Talkdesk Healthcare Experience Clouds for providers and payers and Financial Services Experience Clouds for banking and insurance.

In partnership with Genesys, Bon Secours Mercy Health (BSMH), a healthcare services provider supporting 49 hospitals and 60,000 employees, set out to completely reimagine its customer experience (CX), with the goal of seamlessly meeting patients where they are on the channel of their choice and increasing digital engagement. By employing the Genesys Cloud platform, which is integrated with EPIC and Genesys Cloud Health CX, and leveraging other solutions, such as Genesys Agent Copilot, BSMH saw important improvements in patient and agent experience. The initial phase included a 13 percent improvement per week in appointment scheduling, a 10 percet increase in contact center revenue, and 30-plus seconds of savings in per-call handling time. To build on that success, BSMH is adding additional capabilities, including conversational AI assistance, live webchat, and digital chatbots.

8x8’s vertical market approach broadly addresses larger markets, such as healthcare, as well as point solutions within those industries. For instance, its retail portfolio includes specific solutions for sales and post-sales assistance, while 8x8 Social Connect helps companies convert social conversations into sales and provides seamless shopping across channels. 8x8 also offers notable solutions for underserved smaller markets, such as increasing tenant satisfaction in the rental housing market.

Vertical Focus Across the Broader Organization

We can see the vertical focus in areas beyond the contact center. Mitel, for instance, has introduced OpenScape Health Station HiMed, which optimizes healthcare employee workflows and improves the point-of-care patient experience by facilitating direct communication with care teams and digital bedside engagement. And patient engagement is further enhanced with telehealth and video collaboration functionality through Mitel’s Virtual Care Collaboration Service (VCCS).

Vertical Market Solutions Poised to Accelerate with Agentic AI

The marketing success of providers with industry-focused practices and market use cases has created an entry point for the large-scale adoption of AI-enhanced solutions as the field progresses. For instance, Genesys, which has long catered to this market, recently launched agentic AI service delivery through its Genesys Cloud Agentic Virtual Agent, catching the attention of numerous large retail, financial services, and healthcare customers. Those providers that haven’t built vertical industry practices will be at a disadvantage as customers across verticals start thinking about what comes next.

Nancy Jamison is founder and principal analyst at Jamison Consulting, bringing more than 40 years of experience in contact centers and customer experience. Her career spans many years each at ROLM, Gartner, Jamison Consulting (1.0), and, most recently, Frost & Sullivan, as senior industry director in ICT, with a specialty in the retail and healthcare sectors.