Natural language processing (NLP) technologies leads the AI revolution. It is by far the most visible and popular form of AI. That’s partly because it has to do with one of the most basic fundamental forms of intelligence — language. With NLP, machines have made huge leaps in recent years in recognizing and understanding language — and thus are now learning to communicate just like humans, whether it’s a bot chatting with you via text, or Alexa speaking with you through an Amazon Echo.

Up to a quarter of all companies will have integrated a virtual customer assistant or a chatbot — using some form of NLP — into their customer service by 2020, according to research firm Gartner. Consumer-facing bots get much of the attention, but voice and bot interfaces are pervading the enterprise in ways you sometimes don’t even see. Microsoft’s Cortana, for example, is helping business users do much of their search and processing information by voice, but many other, more hidden work orchestration bots are managing all kinds of other automation throughout the enterprise

For this reason, NLP is arguably the most essential solution for companies to invest in. If your company isn’t part of that the leadership group, it will be a laggard, and miss out on significant productivity gains.

Customers are pushing this, too. They’re embracing smart assistants and other bots at an unexpected rate, changing the rules for engagement. Customer expectations have made that evolutionary leap along with NLP technology, which means text analytics, including speech-to-text technologies, need to become essential parts of the NLP solutions you buy into.

But we’re also looking at the rise of intelligent chatbots and the need to invest in perfecting semantic search.

To stay up with NLP, large companies will need to look into deep learning themselves, as well as unsupervised and supervised machine learning — because some of the big platform offerings from Amazon, Google or Microsoft are too general still be applied in specific industry verticals. Or if companies are smaller, they’ll need to rely on these and other providers and come up with their own workarounds.

But that’s the high-level report. Want a deep dive into how these technologies are actually transforming company strategies and delivering concrete ROI? A look at real-world case studies from companies reaping the benefits of NLP investment? It’s time to register for Transform 2019, in San Francisco on July 10-11.

Transform 2019 will be the AI event of the year for executives who want a front-row seat on implementing AI strategies and technologies — not only how to nail the benefits, but also how to minimize the fails. Register now or learn more here.