The Definitive Guide to Virtual Agents
What You Need to Know Before You Buy
Something that you have probably realized in your research is that virtual agents come by a wide variety of names including virtual agent, virtual support agent, virtual assistant, virtual employee assistant, and more. For the purpose of this document, we are standardizing on “virtual agent” to refer to an AI-based method for employee self-help.
Gartner defines virtual agents (or assistants as you will see in this definition) as follows:
“Virtual assistants (VAs) help users or enterprises with a set of tasks previously only made possible by humans. VAs use semantic and deep learning (such as deep neural networks [DNNs], natural language processing, prediction models, recommendations and personalization) to assist people or automate tasks. VAs listen to and observe behaviors, build and maintain data models, and predict and recommend actions. VAs can be deployed in several use cases, including virtual personal assistants, virtual customer assistants and virtual employee assistants.”
