Age of Invisible Machines

Preface by Josh Tyson xi

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction by Robb Wilson xvii

Part I Imagining an Ecosystem of Intelligent Digital Workers 1

1 Hyperautomation Is Already Here 3

Get ready for the implications directly engaging with technology through conversation will bring

2 What Conversational Artificial Intelligence Is— and Isn’t 15

Automation solutions are part of an ecosystem of technologies working in concert
3 Competing in the Age of Hyperautomation 25

Hyperautomating means accomplishing more with less while automating new and more sophisticated processes You have to move fast, you have to take risks, and you have to be ready to fail
4 The Ethics of Experiential AI 33

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”
5 How Hyperautomation Can Change the World 41

Where there are disruptive innovations being sequenced, there are hyperdisruptions
6 This Journey Has Been Personal 67

The content in this book derives from 2,000,000+ hours of testing with over 30,000,000 people participating across 10,000 conversational applications

Part II Planning an Ecosystem of Intelligent Digital Workers 71
7 Learning the Terms 75

The journey to an intelligent ecosystem of digital workers will likely be arduous and complex, but it’s also a journey of self-discovery

8 The Dream vs Reality 83

The ice-bath reality is that creating an intelligent digital ecosystem requires more than just a few machines thrown at a few different problem areas
9 Ecosystem Evolution Explained 87

There are four evolutionary phases that an intelligent digital worker can move through as it becomes better at completing tasks
10 Teams and the Co- Creation Mindset 97

The core enablement team will guide your whole organization as the creators and keepers of your strategy
11 Preparing Tools and Architecture 109

This is a big undertaking, and you need to make sure you’re equipped with the right tools
12 Vetting Your Vendors 135

Asking vendors the right questions early on can avoid time wasted exploring inadequate tools and platforms for hyperautomation
13 Articulating Your Strategy to Others 143

The challenge is getting the decision makers to accept the fact that this requires involvement from—and potentially the restructuring of—every department inside your organization

Part III Building An Ecosystem of Intelligent Digital Workers 153
14 The Process of Hyperautomating 155

A proper strategy for achieving and maintaining hyperautomation includes everyone in your workforce, leveraging individual areas of expertise
15 Design Strategy for Hyperautomation 173

Users aren’t comparing their experience with your solution to experiences with other similar technologies—they’re comparing them to conversations with other humans
16 Production Design for Hyperautomation 191

Production design finds conversational designers creating the experiences people will have conversing with machines
17 Best Practices in Conversational Design 201

Through building thousands of conversational AI applications over the past decade, I’ve identified nearly 60 best practices for conversational design

Part IV Conclusion 227
18 Where Do We Go from Here? 229

Notes 235

About the Authors 241

Index 243