PegaWorld Was Rich with Customer Testimonials
LAS VEGAS--Businesses and individuals around the world are facing very similar economic and geopolitical challenges, though they are relying on Pega's technologies in different ways to address them, speakers said during day 2 of the PegaWorld conference.>
Rabobank, a 125-year-old global financial services firm with Dutch roots, is on the front lines of the battle against financial crimes, which in 2023 contributed to $485.6 billion in worldwide losses from fraud.
"Our purpose is to safeguard our customers, bank, and society by detecting and preventing crime," Erica van de Ven, Rabobank's global head of financial economic crime tech, said during the opening keynote.
That was not easy to do while Rabobank operated largely in silos, a fact that fraudsters exploited often by going after different systems simultaneously or in a very short amount of time with duplicate credit requests or excessive withdrawals before the siloed systems could catch the fraud.
"We had to do a lot of manual work to make detection and prevention happen," van de Ven said. But manual detection couldn't keep up with the speed of the attempted fraud, especially with fraudsters using increasingly sophisticated and powerful technology themselves.
So the bank embarked on a transformation journey, one that still continues today. The first step was to establish a baseline for the existing technology, then to determine the needed model, workflow, and data enhancements. Now all of the fraud-related systems are integrated rather than standing alone.
"We have the critical processes for anti-money laundering and for customer due diligence. We have guided workshops building data with routing prioritization. We have dashboards in which they can see the data in the right spot for right now," van de Ven said. "The same holds for our data. Instead of looking it up in open-source systems, we now have a global data platform with strict data governance, high-quality data. We have come a long way in 2.5 years; we want to go further."
Last year Rabobank introduced chatbots and simplified interaction logs. This year, it is adding generative reporting, case summaries, and emerging risk detection.
Like Rabobank, Verizon had a lot of siloed solutions. But unlike Rabobank, Verizon's need to integrate them had nothing to do with fraud. Verizon's need to change stemmed from a desire to work with customers differently, said Vivek Gurumurthy, senior vice president and chief information officer of Verizon's consumer and business group. "We are not a traditional telecom company anymore," he said.
Verizon still has telecom, but it also offers a combination of wireless, broadband, business, and security solutions.
"Technology innovation is accelerating at an unprecedented pace," Gurumurthy said. "It's just going to get more and more intense. Customers are going to get a lot more anxious, and they're going to be a lot more demanding of us the way they interact with each other, with businesses, and with society. Everything is going to change."
So businesses have to change as well.
"We have to transform internally as well. We have transformed the way we work," Gurumurthy said. "We have to transform the way we develop our systems and the way we gather experiences for our customers. So we decided that it will go all in."
Gurumurthy added: "We're not experimenting with AI. We're actually investing in it as a strategic imperative to enable transformation at all frontiers: employee experience, efficiency, productivity, and, most importantly, customer experience. AI is at the forefront of everything we're doing at Verizon today."
Some customers have one Verizon service, others have a multitude. And those customers will communicate with the company through a variety of channels, Gurumurthy said. So the company had to enable them to communicate through whatever channel they wanted and to be able to start an interaction in one channel and finish it in another. "Customers want to talk to us in a multi-modal format. Customers want us to have the information that we need to service them."
That means having immediate access to content for previous interactions between the customer and the company, Gurumurthy related. "We wanted to be proactive with care. This was huge for us."
When interacting with customers, live agents and AI agents have to be ready to deliver the next-best action. To do that, they need data, insights, and actions all sitting together.
These are all capabilities Pegasystems has made possible, helping with Verizon's continued transformation, according to Gurumurthy.
The AI in use at Verizon and elsewhere has made incredible strides in the last couple of years, said Rob Walker, Pegasystems general manager of customer engagement. However, hallucinations still persist and have even tripled over the past few years.
However, humans make errors as well, and often at a higher rate than AI. So, depending on the usage, AI still needs to be kept in a "safety harness," Walker advised.
Though AI can deliver answers faster than humans, it cannot yet be said that it's smarter than most humans. When that happens, it will be artificial super intelligence, according to Walker.
Don Schuerman, Pegasystems' chief technology officer, pushed conference attendees to use Blueprint, a generative AI technology the company unveiled at last year's conference and just updated.
"Our mission as a company is to change the way the world builds [solutions]," Schuerman said. "We want to do that for every enterprise that has the needs of more efficiency, removing their legacy debt, to better serve and engage their customers."