Recently AWS released a “Knowledge Brief” illustrating how Fortune 1000 companies are taking a deeper interest in AI related products and services for their contact centers. While I think there are plenty of points which could be argued, for the sake of this post, I will focus on the intro graph as this is the springboard to the whole document created by the Aberdeen Group’s research. Let’s start with the graph:

First, I was surprised of the atribution for the spike in contact center solutions research to the Google Duplex presentation during I/O 2018. Second, the report goes on to state that the red line declining off to the right are the search results for PBX because “firms are not as active in researching best practices and trends in use of PBX.” These two points stuck to me as odd specially if you’re building a whole paper on those two premises so I took it upon myself to see if I could indepedently confirm their positions.

Considering the paper states that this is all about research I decided to go to world’s research webpage: Google; specifically Google Trends. Let’s tackle the spike in research due to the announcement of Google Duplex. You will see that Google registered the terms “google duplex” spiking in May which matches with their blog post linked above. The report’s graph has this spike happening in July which is not correct. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt that the x-axis is mislabled since there certainly was a spike in research on these terms.

The papers second point is around the decline of research around the term PBX. The document states “..it’s reflected through the dark red line that’s particularly trending downwards between July and September 2018.” The main reason why this caught my eye is because of the term PBX. As those of you in the conctact center business know the term PBX really has gone out of use in the late 90s and even more today in the 2000s. Mainly because with VoIP the PBX term is not used as broadly. Make no mistake things like Cisco’s CommunicationManager and Asterisks are PBXes, but they are so much more thus why the term has fallen out of favor. Given this information let’s compare how the term PBX and ACD, a more broadly used term to almost mean the same thing, have trended for the time period this report covers.

Neither term has really seen a decline. Heck you could argue that PBX saw an increase between May and July while ACD saw an increase after July. Ultimately debunking the premise this whole document stands upon.

AI/ML is the hot new topic, but there’s a time and a place for everything. This paper’s whole premise for an AI future relies on faulty data which causes the whole article to fall apart. This, like may other pieces, are more hype than substance.

~david