Being able to deliver a virtual personalised assistant to every staff member and student on campus is a step closer to reality for the University of Canberra after it signed up to a new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot platform.

How to successfully combine automation and AI with human intelligence to optimise customer interactions digitally took centre stage at the latest CMO and Bold360 roundtable series in Melbourne. Here are pictorial highlights from our marketing and customer engagement leaders event.

In an era where making things easy for the customer has become paramount, it is not surprising to see many brands turning to chatbots to resolve customer queries quickly.

Chatbots are the customer-experience (CX) buzz technology of 2018, and there is no doubt that when implemented properly, they can improve CX for thousands of consumers, freeing up call centre staff to focus on higher-value conversations.

Increased sales conversion, more efficient customer service support and better business decision making are just some of the benefits Progressive Direct claims it’s experiencing after overhauling customer management systems internally.

No one would doubt it’s been a tough decade for retailers, and many have failed in the face of digital disruption and transformation. But for Salesforce senior VP of retail and consumer goods, Shelley Bransten, the rise of relationship-based engagement is offering up reasons to be increasingly optimistic about the retail market moving forward.

Companies looking to automate all their customer experience using artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning are likely to fail at delivering the seamless, post-channel CX experiences customers want.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay. And while brands are in varying stages of maturity with AI projects and strategies, there’s one common principle: The nascent technology needs to meet customer expectations in a simple and useful manner.

Building a successful use case for emerging technologies like chatbots is less about the technology and more about your ability to embrace human-centred ways of thinking and working, AGL’s innovation manager, Sam King, says.

AustralianSuper has launched its chatbot, ‘Ash’, following the soft launch of its in-app messaging platform in December last year, which has seen more than 50,000 messages sent, and the achieving a 92 per cent overall customer satisfaction rate.

Technology and data are transforming customer service support in unprecedented ways, making the pursuit of it a strategic priority for CMOs. In our latest Food for Thought series we asked leading marketers: What ways are technology and data transforming customer service and support?

Health insurance provider, nib, has debuted a new ‘going to hospital tool’ designed to help customers have a better, more informed and potentially less costly experience when being admitted to hospital.

Getting consumers to successfully adopt your brand’s AI-powered chatbot or voice-based interaction means sticking to simple use cases that tap into marketing, operations and service capabilities across the organisation.

The Climate Council has become the latest brand to step into the world of chatbots, launching a new app through Facebook Messenger to better engage the millennials market.

Brands will increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI) strategies to prioritise personalisation at scale, while ‘fake news’ will continue to influence social strategies as ‘trust declines, while peer influence will rise,” according to Hootsuite’s third annual Social Trends Report.

A new chatbot designed to help Tennis Australia directly sell tickets to the Australian Open 2018 via social media has chalked up 170 per cent more conversions than its traditional go-to-market model.

More psychologists are now coming the tech space because they're trying to teach machines to become more social and sociable, according to BT’s head of customer insight and futures, Dr Nicola Millard.

NAB has launched a virtual chatbot aimed at helping business customers better answer common banking queries online.

All the latest martech and adtech news on Tune, Buzinga, Info, MetaX, Sizmek, Optimizely, H20.ai, TapClicks and Tableau Software.

Three quarters of Australians prefer interacting with customer service bots to achieve simple tasks, a new report from LivePerson revealed.

Artificial intelligence-based apps that blend first and third-party data for better customer engagement interactions, real-time chatbots, and mobile enhancements are among the raft of new capabilities launched by Oracle for its Marketing Cloud platform this week.