Trustworthy chatbots for customer dialog

In this article you will read about,

• how Telekom's AI solutions support companies in customer dialog, 
• how the partner solution from Telekom and Cognigy was one of the first in Germany to be tested according to the new AIC4 catalog,
•  and why the Open Telekom Cloud is an important prerequisite.

"Hello, I'm Bonni! I'm the mascot of Telekom Baskets Bonn! I can answer your questions about Baskets ticketing, the fan store, Baskets players, and how to get to home games." Anyone who clicks on a small magenta paw print on the website of the Bonn-based basketball club is greeted like this in a chat window. If users then enter a question via the message field, they receive Bonni's answer within a few seconds. Fast, practical, and efficient communication, behind which is a solution from Telekom Deutschland in collaboration with partner Cognigy. The company specializes in artificial intelligence for use in customer service and offers voice and chatbots that largely automate customer contact. 

User-friendly interfaces ensure that companies can configure the AI solutions themselves quickly and easily after a brief instruction. As a partner for the sale, hosting, and service of the Cognigy solution, Telekom Deutschland's experts can also take on this part on request: they build, operate, and train the artificial intelligence for the business customers.

Cognigy's voice and chatbot solutions are part of Telekom Deutschland's "Conversational AI Suite," an AI portfolio of different partner solutions that offers customers specialized applications they can put together on a modular basis. "We rely on AI systems from Germany. Our partners develop and host their software here and also provide their support in Germany," says Waldemar Mach, Product Manager UC & AI Managed Solutions at Telekom Deutschland. 

As one of the building blocks of the Conversational AI Suite, Cognigy's AI software recognizes users' concerns in spoken dialog. However, its areas of application for customer dialog also include web chats, apps, and social media channels. This is a growth market, as a study by analytics specialist USU-Software shows: Around one in three of the 180 service managers and specialists from various industries and company sizes surveyed, said they already use chatbots for text or voice processing in customer service. Just under 60 percent said they were planning chatbot projects. 

One of the goals is to save effort, time, and costs in customer service through a high degree of automation. "Solutions from the Conversational AI Suite can optimally handle simple, recurring tasks," says Waldemar Mach. "For example, a voicebot on the hotline can perform a pre-classification of concerns and data reconciliation. In this way, the CRM system with customer information and history is already open when the caller is put through to the agent. This significantly increases efficiency and speed in call centers."

Something that is important in all solutions: The security and integrity of the applications and all the data collected and processed by the AI solutions. "We check the systems in accordance with our Telekom-internal compliance benchmarks and ethical principles," explains Mach.
Telekom has now additionally become one of the first offerings in Germany to have its AI portfolio audited according to the AIC4 criteria catalog of the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). This catalog "specifies minimum requirements for the secure use of machine learning methods in cloud services," according to the BSI. The focus: freedom from bias and transparency, security and resilience, reliability, and data quality. AIC4 is also intended to expand the C5 criteria catalog, which in turn formulates the minimum requirements for a secure cloud computing.

"According to the AIC4 catalog, you can only have solutions tested that are hosted on an infrastructure that complies with the BSI C5 criteria catalog," says Mach. This is a requirement that the Conversational AI Suite meets, because the artificial intelligence is hosted and operated in the C5-compliant Open Telekom Cloud. This offers maximum data protection and security as well as not being subject to the US Cloud Act due to its European origin. "These aspects are very important for our joint marketing strategy." 

Since June, the Conversational AI Suite with partner Cognigy has been classified as trustworthy AI according to the AIC4 criteria catalog. The BSI report thus confirms the security and compliance conformity of the voice and chatbots. "We will have this test repeated regularly in the future," says Mach. The BSI envisages this for both AIC4 and the C5 test of the public cloud.

Thanks to its secure, tested infrastructure, the Open Telekom Cloud also provides the starting point for other AI offerings. For example, business customers have access to the ModelArts service, an end-to-end development platform for artificial intelligence that allows users to create, train, and operate individual solutions even without programming skills.