By 2020, 60% of meetings with three or more participants will involve a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants will support many activities as part of organizing and attending meetings and will integrate with enterprise applications.

Contextualizing Virtual Assistants for More Effective Meetings in the Digital Workplace-Gartner

Among the emerging technologies, virtual support agent (VSA) is a key application that Indian businesses should look at to augment customer experience. Gartner’s Hype Cycle for ICT in India maps the trends for Indian CIOs.

Hype Cycle for ICT in India, 2018 -Gartner

Conversational commerce sits at the peak of Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce, 2018. Analyst Mike Lowndes explains how vendors are innovating conversational UI to cater to the particular needs of commerce including product discovery, customer context mapping and general understanding. While the technology is yet to become mainstream, the utility of conversational systems for many tasks has been proven beyond doubt, he says.

Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce, 2018 -Gartner

Sales bots are scaling the Hype Cycle for Customer Experience pretty rapidly, driven by a growing demand from a cross section of vertical industries, says Gartner. Their application across all B2B, B2C and indirect sales use cases, is helping companies streamline daily sales processes, writes Analyst Tad Travis.

Hype for Customer Experience Analytics, 2018  -Gartner

Gartner’s Hype Cycle for ITSM, 2018 mentions how virtual support agents (VSAs) are augmenting IT service management. Focusing on high-impact use cases (driven by high volume or business criticality) is the key to enterprise success write analysts Kenneth Gonzalez and Chris Matchett.

Hype Cycle for ITSM, 2018 -Gartner

Will AI virtual support agents replace your IT service desk? Read this report by Gartner analysts Chris Matchett, Rich Doheny, Kenneth Gonzalez and Magnus Revang where they evaluate the potential of virtual support agents, and the current limitations thereof.

When Will AI Virtual Support Agents Replace Your IT Service Desk? -Gartner

“Conversational AI-based applications are being increasingly used by many types of organizations as an addition or replacement for more traditional interaction patterns, including human agents, web/mobile interfaces, IVR and live chat. Organizations are undertaking projects developing the conversational agents based on the use of conversational AI platforms like the ones profiled in this report.”  – David Schubmehl, research director, Cognitive/Artificial Intelligence Systems, IDC.

IDC Innovators: Conversational AI Software Platforms, 2018 -IDC