Bandwidth Inc., (NASDAQ: BAND), a prominent global enterprise cloud communications company, has joined forces with Google and Cognigy to unveil AIBridge. This innovative solution empowers enterprises to effortlessly implement voice-based artificial intelligence (AI) tools within their contact centers, leading to quicker and more efficient call resolutions within the communications cloud. AIBridge marks the latest addition to Bandwidth Maestro, the company’s award-winning next-generation enterprise cloud communications platform, which is now available.

Bandwidth AIBridge enhances customer service by enabling enterprises to expedite the resolution of customer issues. This not only improves the overall customer experience (CX) and agent satisfaction but also reduces operating costs for contact centers. With AIBridge, incoming calls to an enterprise contact center can be initially directed to an AI-driven virtual agent, thanks to a pre-built integration with Bandwidth’s Maestro platform.

If the caller’s issue can be resolved through conversational AI, such as replacing a lost credit card or rebooking a flight, the call can be completed within the communications cloud, without the need for connecting to the contact center or a live agent. As a result, enterprises can maintain uninterrupted customer service using virtual agents and self-service capabilities through AIBridge, even when live agents are unavailable.

The potential cost savings are substantial. According to GartnerⓇ, “conversational AI will reduce contact center agent labor costs by US$80 billion in 2026, increasing to $240 billion by 2031. In 2031, conversational AI chatbots and virtual assistants will handle 30 percent of interactions that would have otherwise been handled by a human agent, up from just two percent in 2022”.

AIBridge’s initial integrations include Cognigy and Google Cloud’s Dialogflow, both renowned leaders in conversational AI, with additional integrations planned for the near future.

Cognigy.AI, Cognigy’s enterprise conversational AI platform, delivers top-tier conversational and generative AI solutions to contact centers, automating customer journeys, enhancing customer and agent engagement, and increasing first-call resolution.

Dialogflow, part of Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI solution, empowers enterprise customers to create advanced virtual agents in minutes, capable of seamlessly transitioning between topics, handling supplemental questions, and operating across multiple channels around the clock to minimize live agent interventions.

Because these integrations are pre-built on the Bandwidth Maestro platform, they significantly expedite enterprise IT development, reducing the time required from months to hours. Furthermore, enterprises can easily design intricate call flows using Bandwidth Visual Builder, a software-based, low code/no code drag-and-drop call flow designer.

Hardy Myers, SVP of Business Development & Strategy at Cognigy, stated, “Bandwidth Maestro is truly an innovative enterprise-class voice platform that, when paired with Cognigy.AI, will make conversational and generative AI more accessible and manageable enabling accelerated customer service transformation”.

Yariv Adan, Sr. AI Director, Product Management, Google Cloud AI, commented, “AI is transforming the customer service experience, and we’re excited to partner with Bandwidth to bring its customers rich, intuitive customer conversations with the help of Google Cloud’s conversational AI technology”.

John Bell, Chief Product Officer at Bandwidth, explained, “Bandwidth AIBridge enables enterprises to make the transition from traditional IVR technologies to full-service conversational AI bot platforms, and move them in front of the contact center to operate 24/7/365. It gets even better: using Bandwidth Visual Builder, there’s no software coding necessary to compose and connect complex call flows for any contact center use case”.

Announced earlier this year, Bandwidth Maestro is a groundbreaking next-generation enterprise cloud communications platform. It empowers IT teams to overcome the challenge of integrating real-time voice apps seamlessly across unified communications, cloud contact center, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning platforms. Maestro’s open, platform-agnostic approach sets it apart in the Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) landscape. It offers the essential technology bridge that enterprises need to create a modern customer experience (CX) stack without extensive integration work, resulting in quicker time-to-value, improved customer and employee experiences, and enhanced loyalty. Maestro operates on the Bandwidth Communications Cloud, which spans over 65 countries and covers more than 90 percent of the global GDP.