The world of modern communication has never been filled with more noise. Every minute sees an average of 16 million text messages, almost half a million tweets and 156 million emails sent , and those numbers are growing. Companies haven’t been on the sidelines of this massive increase in communication data, either: Firms have expanded customer touchpoints to email, social media, online chat and mobile embedded content.
With the explosion of content, businesses have struggled to ensure brand compliance, readability and an optimized customer outreach experience. On the other side, according to the World Economic Forum, consumers are lost in a sea of content, spending valuable time searching for signals that matter to them. As a result, competition in the information market has intensified to the point that it is now close to a winner-take-all game. Now, more than ever, content makes or breaks the customer experience.
Founded in 1998 as Prinova, Messagepoint has grown along with the content boom, beginning as a service-focused customer communications management (CCM) integrator, and over time, becoming a top global software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for managing customer-facing content.
Messagepoint helps organizations in regulated industries cut through the complexity of delivering exceptional customer communications. Whether firms are struggling with long change cycles, a lack of control over regulatory content, crippling inefficiency and cost or a lack of meaningful personalization, Messagepoint can help. Their hybrid cloud-based platform gets customers up and running fast while keeping customer data where companies need it to stay – behind the firewall.
In a major drive towards automated content intelligence – the application of natural language processing and machine learning to the creation, managing and editing of content – Messagepoint applied for the IBM Innovation Incubator’s Project Support Program. Managed by Communitech, IBM and OCE, the program provided contractors to help integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into the core business functions of successful applicants.
Messagepoint then embarked on two highly experimental projects. The first was to train an advanced artificial intelligence system that would understand documents in any format or any language, based on document layout, images and text. The second was to be able to compute content similarity irrespective of the content languages. Both of these functionalities are highly desired in the content management industry, but have never been successfully offered as a product offering.
The company found a way, in combination with the University of Western Ontario’s AI researchers, to apply layer after layer of transfer learning, image processing and natural language processing techniques to train neural networks which could detect exactly what a document was, simply from the layout and images contained – and could then understand the sentiment in such a document.
Their research work has received recognition in various AI and data-related academic venues, and it has contributed significantly towards the next iteration of the Messagepoint’s MARCIE platform. Today the MARCIE platform is one of the few industry leading content intelligence platforms that harnesses the power of AI for communication content.
Their new AI approach to content migration, authoring and management through the Messagepoint Advanced Rationalization and Content Intelligence Engine (MARCIE) , enables them to handle the complexity of regulated, personalized omni-channel customer communications in ways that others can only dream of.
Today, Communitech continues to sponsor the next generation of revolutionary technology integration programs, such as those used by Messagepoint, to develop MARCIE. In the AI space in particular, Communitech, in partnership with the Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks (CENGN), provides a commercial-grade private cloud system.
Complete with Nvidia V100 cards for model training, cutting-edge data centre equipment, modern software defined networking, and function virtualization systems, the platform plays a major role in taking Waterloo Region technologies to market. Learn more about our platform and related funding opportunities here, and join Messagepoint in our next advanced technology cohort.
