Verizon Business Assistant, which is being announced today, uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) to enable small businesses to automate customer interactions and provide instant responses to common questions.
“Small business owners are constantly juggling multiple responsibilities and want to use technology to improve operations and better connect with their customers,” Iris Meijer, Verizon Business’ Chief Product & Marketing Officer, said in a press release.
“Verizon Business Assistant has been designed to alleviate some of that pressure by automating routine customer interactions using AI. It also addresses an increasing customer demand — particularly from younger generations — for easy digital tools to communicate with businesses on simple matters. This allows small business owners to focus on growing their business while ensuring their customers feel valued and connected to the business.”
Verizon Business Assistant also learns, though the press release did not explicitly say that the platform includes machine learning software. A human is connected if a question is asked to which it does not know the answer. The response is stored in the system and can be provided to the next customer with the same query.
In addition to being able to hand off callers to humans, key features of Verizon Business Assistant are automated responses; continuous learning, text messaging capabilities, insight generation, easy setup, and customizability. The company says that the major benefits are time saving and the abilities to serve more customers, enhance engagement and gain insights.
There is something of a race to deploy AI in the telecommunications and IT sectors, as elsewhere. Before the announcement of Verizon Business Assistant today, Verizon Business introduced AI Connect in January. The company said the service will enable organizations to deploy AI at scale. Two of the first customers are Google Cloud and Meta.
Telecompetitor spoke to one of those clients in late February. Anil Jain, the Global Managing Director, Strategic Consumer Industries at Google Cloud, suggested that generative and agentic AI are transformative.
The two iterations of AI provide “access to more real-time data than any person can handle, and because you can process that you can discover new things and solve problems that are too complicated for one person to solve on their own,” he told Telecompetitor. “It’s like the discovery of a new drug or the creation of a new type of building material.”
