Q&A with Guanchun Wang, Chairman and CEO of Laiye on Laiye being recognized for the first time in Gartner®  Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms

Laiye, a pioneer in the Work Execution System, trusted by 1000+ enterprises globally, was recognized as a Niche Player by Gartner in the 2023 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms for the first time. On March 13, Gartner announced the Critical Capabilities report for Enterprise ConversationalAI Platforms, in which Laiye excelled in its Channel integration, Voice, and Conversation management.

This report evaluated 19 vendors across 11 Critical Capabilities based on various criterias such as language understanding, conversational context, human-like conversation, and integration capabilities.  It states Laiye Conversational AI (CAI) Platform is part of a broader Work Execution System and Intelligent Automation solutions suite, which also includes robotic process automation and Intelligent Document Processing. Laiye Conversational AI products provide great no-code tools for conversation management, with solid analytics and diverse deployment options that we believe meet Gartner's expectations for all available metrics.

"This report recognized Laiye's seven years of focus on Conversational AI, global capabilities, and continuous innovation," said Guanchun Wang, Chairman and CEO of Laiye. Here is his interpretation of Laiye's inclusion in a Q&A format.

Why is Laiye being selected into Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platform monumental?

First of all, I think Gartner's launching of Enterprise Conversation AI Platform Magic Quadrant is a great recognition for the industry. There are thousands of conversational AI startups and tech giants who work in this field for many years. Given this magic quadrant, it's actually recognizing the importance of this category. This means conversational AI agents or chatbots will become even more prevalent in business in multiple organizations.

Second of all, Laiye as a conversational AI vendor with roots in China, we got included in this magic quadrant report in its second year. I think it's a great recognition for the Chinese market for enterprise AI at the same time, and it is recognizing a Chinese company with ambition going global. So I think this is really monumental.

Why can Laiye be selected on its first attempt?

There's a Chinese saying, it takes 7 years to hone a great sword. So what we saw on the surface is like it got into this Magic Quadrant on its first attempt. But actually, over the past 7 years, Laiye has been improving our conversation AI product and we have served many customers across multiple industries, large and small. This is really a result of multiple years of hard work.

What strength does Laiye have compared to other vendors?

Gartner has listed several of our strengths in the Magic Quadrant reports. I'd like to highlight 2 of them. First is geographic coverage. We know conversational AI platform is often related to multiple languages, but many conversational AI vendors focused in one country or one region, primarily because of the language constraints. However, Laiye supports multiple languages from very early on, and especially after we acquired French conversational AI startup Mindsay last year. We are supporting over 100 languages now and we are in China, Southeast Asia and Europe to support many customers who want to embrace conversational AI solutions.

Secondly, it's about the overall viability or sustainability of the company. We all know there's tremendous potential and opportunity for conversational AI business. However, it takes a long time to build a really great product and build a sustainable business. And given the Series C funding round last year of 160 million dollars. Laiye is well capitalized to continue this journey and to help more businesses and organizations to develop their Chatbots, to develop their digital workforce solutions.

How do you  interpret the cautions in the report?

One of the cautions Gartner mentioned in its report is our investment in research and also the overall development of this Conversational AI product, especially compared to the overall size of Laiye. As you all know, Laiye is developing a new category Work Execution System(WES) which combines multiple automation AI technologies such as Robotic Process Automation(RPA),  Intelligent Document Processing(IDP) and Conversational AI.

That's why we have different product lines and conversational AI platforms. And because we have worked on this product for over 7 years, we think this is the traditional form of Conversational AI platform which is already relatively mature. Now at Laiye, we have a company wide innovation and AI team which allow us to leverage the cutting edge NLP technologies, such as Large Language Model(LLM) and ChatGPT and incorporate these new capabilities into all of all of our product lines. And obviously, Conversational AI platform will be the first to benefit from such advances of AI and we are actively working on it. You will be seeing an acceleration of our product innovation when it comes to the Conversational AI platform.

Is the arrival of ChatGPT an opportunity or threat to Enterprise Conversational AI Platform vendors?

Well, this is a great question. Many people think with Open AI  ChatGPT or GPT 4 and some other companies are also working on this, like Google and Baidu, chatbot would be prevalent. At the same time, do you still need a conversational AI platform to build and maintain these chatbots? In my view, what ChatGPT did show us is the tremendous potential of a Chatbot, a conversational agent in the world of work for organizations and businesses.

However, they're not tailor made for those use cases. For example, the responses from the ChatGPT are not always accurate. And also it's not enterprise-grade. Companies like Laiye can work on incorporating this enhanced capability to build even more powerful enterprise-grade Conversational AI platform, to prioritize data security to make sure the Chatbot will be more accurate in responses and also having a higher recall. So this type of work will still be very necessary to build a enterprise great conversational AI platform. And I think that's also why Gartner launched this new category with this new magic quadrant. And with the advance of Large Language Models, this new category of enterprise conversation AI platform will evolve even faster and Laiye will try our best to ride on this wave and bring Conversational AI solutions to more businesses and organizations in the near future.

In the future, Laiye will continue to integrate the latest AI technologies such as Large Language Models and Generative AI to enhance the capabilities of our Work Execution Platform, expand our industry solutions. As a pioneer in defining  work, we believe we will change the future of work.

Access a copy of the full report: Critical Capabilities for Enterprise ConversationalAI Platforms

‍