エージェント型AIを大規模に機能させるために必要なこと

All right, hello, I'm back here at CCW Europe. I am with Michel from Ascent. Local for you, this, isn't it? Yes, yes. Very close, I'm very close. So, those of you that are tuning to VUX regularly, we've had Ascent on the podcast probably last year, I think. Some of your colleagues, Kellen and Ricky, were on there sharing about some of the kind of agent-facing AI solutions that you've got going on. what's changed recently at Ascend? Any recent developments you can share with us in terms of how you're leveraging AI? Of course, I think we, you said it already, agent-facing, I think we're moving more towards customer-facing agent solutions. We invest a lot of effort into getting a really solid foundation there on which we can really build. So one of the things that we recently released is an agentic agent around home batteries who's fully agentic. It's a small pilot with a specific group of customers

that can help us really understand how it acts and how we can build upon that to scale it to large use cases. Nice. What are some of the considerations you've got then? You know, a lot of businesses are going through this now where they're starting to deploy more agentic capabilities. You speak to a lot of vendors that are down here. there are talks, zero hallucination, everything's rosy. What are some of the learnings that you have of going through that process? At the start of this year, we really looked into what is needed to do Agentec at scale, and we also noticed that some of the foundations still at our company are not there yet, so that we have some work on our side. If you talk to the vendors here, I can acknowledge that the technology is there to do it, but you also need some solid foundations to work with. For example, what we at Ascent were struggling with for a bit was how do we manage the knowledge management part. And we had pretty scattered around our landscape, but also on performance level, both on the speed of your API.

So you want fast response rates. You do not want that to impact customer behavior. But also how do you want to let the agent feel and sound like And make it really empathic feel at the same experience almost as talk to a human and there we saw that the thing that you use could be tweaked or improved or added upon to really deliver that experience interesting we spoke a little bit earlier didn't we around so like the technology is kind of proving and has proven itself in many cases but a lot of the stuff that is the important part is the less glamorous, less sexy part of actually making it work in reality and enterprise with integrations and legacy infrastructure and different teams that do different things and all that kind of stuff. So it's not always as simple as just having tech that works, that would be. Yeah, correct. And if you add upon that a little bit, I think it's also a lot about change management. These new solutions and these technologies go really fast, but you

You have to take the whole company onto this journey. So you want to make it a positive experience, but not make colleagues who are currently handling customer questions or even higher management start to fear the new technology instead of embracing the new technology. So it's also about what is the company's appetite to change and how fast can you change on the technology side, and those need to be in balance. and make it successful. Yeah. I think one of the things that is moving pretty quickly is this whole idea of personal agents and potentially agent-to-agent kind of communication, or at least personal agent-to-business communication. And the change there for businesses is one that they might not have a choice about because you can't control if a million people start using news to contact their energy provider. So I don't know if it's early or not, whether you have any thoughts about that in terms of as a business.

Are you thinking about this agent-to-agent world or personal agents contacting the business? Any thoughts on that? So I have strong opinions about it. So I like to share them. So let's go. So first of all, some of the companies and also competitors of ours have nice talks about an agent calling a human agent and then trying to arrange something, which is something I personally don't believe in that's going to happen, at least not at large scales maybe only more at the phishing kind of scenarios mainly because it very ineffective So of course where agents and agentic is really strong at being really efficient And it's not efficient to call with a human and then to go through verification and talk and have to explain yourself again. So I feel more to agent-to-agent, agent-to-machine kind of, that that will be the future, instead of that there's a human in between or whatever.

Because if an agent is able, for example, to call customer service and is able to authenticate themselves and is able to handle that question, it should also be able to use the self-service portal and to do the calculations there. So it's kind of, for me, insanity that would be the pattern that would win in the end. Interesting. But you're still thinking about it from maybe not an agent to a human, but at least an automation to automation type of landscape, though. For sure. And then to look back a little bit to the agent to human and then the agent to employee, it has a security risk, for sure. So what we also saw in the past that there were attempts to get information from our customers through our automations by trying to fish or ask questions. So I think that's an important part to also keep focus on, that maybe it's not winning on technology side or for a business perspective not very feasible,

but it's also an angle that we need to keep in mind that we stay safe on that part also with the customer data. And to the agent to agent Discussion I think there are too many horses To bet upon I do think that The personalized agents Whatever you are going to use A Vendors Cloud Or a JTT That those vendors Will have a lot of leverage In the In the coming years So if you draw the parallel to energy markets. So currently the price comparison websites I think also in the UK has a lot of power a lot of market share and I think that market share will start to shift to more technology providers because those have the trust of the of the customer to find the best offer and then for their agents it would I think

would make more sense to directly contact the suppliers and then try to get the deal there instead of contacting an in-between party. so we need to prepare to also have another sales channel for example that we need to deal with and also provide that channel with the right information that in the end they provide towards our potential customers Interesting, have you seen kind of any evidence of this happening yet or is this something that's a bit far into the future do you think? I think it's happening right now so we do monitor on volumes and where the traffic comes from And you see that traffic keeps on the higher amount of traffic calls from technology parties Through Claude or through Gemini So we see it happening right now But you can also see it in your daily life, right? So if you go by train, how many people are working with their agent and trying to figure their stuff out

So it's here already interesting yeah it's interesting I've heard similar from other companies that it's like maybe it's not massive now but it's happening the question is does it explode or does it steadily grow or does it not type of thing what's your thoughts do you think that this personal agents acting on behalf of people contacting businesses do you think that's something that we'll see arising or no for now with the knowledge that we have for now I would say that's the current channel trend that is happening so if you look a little bit down the line you first had phone then you had websites then you had app and now you see the shift towards more agentic to personal assistants so yeah if I put my money on something it's the age of of this interesting Michel appreciate your time thank you so much no problem nice one