Why you really won’t get fired buying from IBM
Watson Assistant releases new Enterprise plan
There is an old adage in the tech business that you won’t get fired buying from IBM. When it comes to conversational AI in the age of Covid, that adage has never been more relevant.
When the pandemic started in early 2020, the customer service departments of banks, healthcare providers, and other large companies faced unprecedented volumes of calls. The situation got even worse with lockdowns, which prevented call center agents from coming to work. Enterprises in all industries realized that conversational AI had to become a first line of defense for customer service interactions— and that AI had to be secure, compliant, and scalable.
Here at IBM Watson, we work with some of the largest companies in the world. It should come as no surprise then that our assistant-building product, Watson Assistant, has risen to the challenge.
Announcing the Enterprise Plan!
We are pleased to announce that starting today, Watson Assistant is offering the Enterprise plan, specifically designed for clients who need to seamlessly scale an assistant to huge volumes of users. The Enterprise plan includes all of the market differentiating features of the Plus plan, but with higher capacity limits, additional security features, custom onboarding support to get you going, and a lower overall cost at higher volumes!
Pricing — Lower Cost at High Volumes
On pricing, we are keeping the model centered around monthly active users, or MAUs. That means we will charge you just once for a customer that comes back to use the assistant several times a month. Our philosophy is that your assistant will increasingly become more useful, personalized, and proactive across channels — thus understanding the user’s identity is critical. We also believe the notion of a “session” (something our competition uses to charge) becomes a pretty fuzzy concept in the near future given where things are headed.
The Enterprise plan starts at US$6,000 a month and includes 50,000 MAUs. Additional MAUs cost $120 per 1,000 (that’s 2 cents per MAU cheaper than the plus plan). You can add telephony capabilities for an additional $90 per 1,000 MAUs that talk to you over the phone. The plan also includes options for data isolation, HIPAA readiness, and a number of additional capacity increases as well.
Another way to think about it: This plan brings the total cost of a digital user (web, SMS, Facebook, WhatsApp) to $0.12 and a voice user to $0.21 — regardless of how many times the user engages Watson Assistant in a month. In comparison to the Plus plan, the Enterprise plan accommodates larger volumes at lower per-user costs:
Ring, Ring
One of the biggest new features in Watson Assistant is the phone integration. You’ve probably known that Watson Assistant could answer your end-customer’s questions through digital channels like web chat, SMS, and Facebook Messenger. Now it also can answer questions when customers call your telephone support lines. Instead of clunky tree options (“press 1 for checking, 2 for credit cards…”), Watson Assistant can answer questions naturally like a conversation with a human agent.
Previously, to get your assistant to work over the phone, the solution required a separate, standalone product. But the Enterprise plan now orchestrates the entire phone call natively with the ability to handle up to large volumes of phone calls concurrently (and more concurrency can be purchased).
Enterprise-Grade Security
When we were developing the Enterprise plan, we heard from clients that many of our competitors did not address the security and compliance needs of large companies. In heavily regulated industries like banking and telecom, regulatory compliance and data isolation are major pain points.
We are addressing this with a bevy of enterprise-grade features now included in the Enterprise plan:
- Activity Tracker with LogDNA integration: Clients can keep track of changes and who made them over time. This makes reversions and administration easier.
- Log Webhooks and Log Export API: Now you can more easily get conversation logs out of the assistant and into downstream tools for further analysis or action.
- SOC 2: This is a standardized set of processes and security measures to keep data secure, is a major requirement for enterprises, and Watson Assistant is now SOC 2 certified! It covers user privacy, secure access to systems, disaster recovery, and quality assurance. The standard makes it easier for auditing firms to assess how securely a vendor’s products and services are.
- Data privacy: Your assistant data is never shared and never made public. Furthermore, Enterprise plan data will not be used by IBM to learn from or improve the underlying Watson Assistant AI models. Your data is your data.
- Data Isolation add-on: Brings peace of mind by physically isolating assistant training, session, and log data from other clients — which also enables a number of other features such as the ability to bring your own encryption key, HIPAA-readiness, higher limits on log storage, and a batch-classification API that can be used for regression testing (and doesn’t draw down on MAUs). This option is an additional $10,000 per month.
Custom Onboarding
Finally, Enterprise plan buyers get white glove onboarding support from Watson Assistant experts. They meet clients one-on-one and help them get started with their implementations and use cases.
Get Going Today!
Many of our clients begin using Watson Assistant with the Lite plan, which is free and accommodates 1,000 monthly active users. To get access to more channels including voice, they upgrade to Plus, which contains almost all of our features. It’s the ideal plan to bring the first version of a solution to production. And the Enterprise plan is intended to give clients access to the full power and enterprise-ready features of Watson Assistant.
Visit our pricing and packaging page to get more details and to schedule a call with one of our experts to learn more!
