Conversation and Conversational AI are both changing the modern organization. We discuss parallel tracks in transformational conversation (e.g., the "conversational firm"), and commercial intelligent agents, and ask how they can cross-pollinate for better learning, better understanding, and better innovation.

1. SIKM Leaders: Conversational AI
Katrina Pugh, Columbia University and EY, June 18, 2019

2. Alchemy of conversation: from individual identity to
collective wisdom
• The World Café [conversation] process
reawakens our deep species’ memory of
two fundamental beliefs about human life.
• First, we humans want to work together on
things that matter to us. In fact, this is what
gives satisfaction and meaning to life.
• Second, as we work together, we are able to
access a greater wisdom that is found only
in the collective.
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI
Margaret Wheatley, 2005
What if wisdom is
compiled and presented
back in aggregate?
What if humans are augmented
or nudged to improve the tone
or accuracy?
2

3. Agenda
• Conversation: A 20 year journey
• Conversational AI and its research
• Short tour of conversational AI research today
• Discussion: What’s our responsibility as a KM community?
3

4. Generative Conversation
(A 20 year journey)
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 4

5. 1991: Dialogue (Bohm)
• Dialogue: “To turn toward
another” or “Meaning flowing
through”
• “I can hold the space for you,
but I bring my own
experiences.”
…New, shared meaning
5Four Discussion DisciplinesSIKM Leaders Conversational AI
Bohm, David, Donald Factor and Peter Garrett, Dialogue: A Proposal (1991) http://infed.org/archives/e-
texts/bohm_dialogue.htm

6. 1995: World Café (Juanita Brown and David
Isaacs)
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 6
Small group conversation at a Gurteen Knowledge Café (Source: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Caf%C3%A9#Origin

7. ~1999-today: Conversation spaces (Steve Jobs)
Heightened
awareness
High energy
Not “just chilling”
(What happens
when we “go
digital”?)
Source: TPG Architecture:
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 7

8. 1999: Dialogue Practices (William Isaacs)
8
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI
ListeningSuspension
Respect
Voice
Not assuming
(opposite: Abstraction)
Not judging
(opposite: Certainty )
Appreciating what is
(opposite: Violence)
Sense of agency or authority
(opposite: Idolatry)
Isaacs, William Dialogue and the
Art of Thinking Together,
Currency/Doubleday, 1999.

9. 2011: Knowledge Jam/Knowledge Harvesting
(Intel, Pugh, Dixon)
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 9
1. Captured knowledge not at
appropriate detail level
2. Captured knowledge not in the
right form
3. Knowledge not contextualized
4. Captured knowledge “taken for
granted”
Why use conversation for tacit
knowledge transfer?

10. 2013: Columbia/Motorola Research: 4 Discussion disciplines drive innovation
Skifstad and Pugh, “Beyond netiquette: Discussion discipline drives innovation” (In Smarter Innovation, Ark Group, 2014).
Discussion
discipline Description
1. Integrity Use true voice, research views,
Ask questions that propel
2. Courtesy Respect others and forum.
3. Inclusion Broaden the perspective.
Explain terms, call others in.
4. Translation Summarize/use insights
generated, and help others
with summarizations.
Benefit to
Collaboration
Primarily tonal;
builds community
and social capital.
Primarily content-
related; drives
innovation.
10
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI
In a 2013 Columbia
Information and
Knowledge Strategy
Capstone for Motorola
Solutions we regressed
productivity and
innovation on the use
of the four discussion
disciplines.
Six years later, we can
see in the public sphere:
• Fake news (anti-
integrity),
• Steamrollling (anti-
courtesy),
• Closed-mindedness
(anti-inclusion),
• Certainty, abstraction
(anti-translation).

11. 2015: Text-based communication is on the
rise
Penetrates the office
We hear, “This is quicker
and less intrusive.”
Daily Breakdown of Modes of Communications
TPG Architecture Study of Connectivity, 2015
11Four Discussion DisciplinesSIKM Leaders Conversational AI

12. 2016: Conversational firm is a new model
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 12
• Employees at TechCo are used to (social
media) transparency, have expectations of
having voice, and corporate policies align to
convening structures (physical layout, wiki).
• “Conversation” was more apt [than
‘Openness,’ as a term]…The key is to have an
open enough communication environment so
that the organization can collectively surface
the needs of the current moment and
thoughtfully approach the next.”
Source: A look inside a “Conversational Firm” MIT Sloan Management Review Ideas Made to Matter

13. Conversational AI:
How are modern organizations and
societies collectively surfacing and
solving problems?
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 13

14. SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 14
Conversational AI refers to the study of conversation,
and then use of messaging apps, speech-based
assistants, and chatbots to automate communication
and create personalized customer or employee
experiences at scale.
How is this collaboration?
✓ Studies practices of human conversation, then
✓ Conversation content or guardrails are informed by
the practice, then
✓ New conversation participation is humans and bots

15. Six leading tech companies are pouring money into Conversational AI
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 15
Facebook Natural
Language Processing
and Speech
Our natural language
processing and speech
researchers focus on the
interaction between
people and computers
using human languages,
both in diverse written and
spoken forms... 6,000
languages, deep
learning/neural networks,
natural language
processing, language
identification, text
normalization, word sense
disambiguation, and
machine learning, to break
down the problems, and
build and deploy robust
language translation
solutions.
Google
Language
Research Team
We advance the
state of the art in
natural language
technologies and
build systems that
learn to understand
and use language in
context.
Uses ML to detect
negative
conversation
Google's Perspective
API and this
article. The NY Times
uses it to handle
comments
Microsoft
Research Natural
Language
Processing Group
Develops efficient
algorithms to process
text and to make their
information accessible
to computer
applications. The goal
of the group is to
design and build
software that will
analyze, understand,
and generate
languages that
humans use naturally,
so that eventually
people can address
computers as though
they were addressing
another person.
Apple Machine
Learning Journal
Apple is dedicated to
advancing state-of-the-
art machine learning
technologies. As part of
this, we’re building a
team of exceptional
researchers and
engineers who can infuse
intelligence into our
devices and services to
touch the lives of millions
of users every day. We’re
looking for people with
backgrounds in machine
learning , deep learning,
reinforcement learning,
computer vision, and
language technologies.
Positions are available in
the following areas:
Amazon Alexa AI
The Alexa AI team contributes
to the magic that is Alexa. Our
goal is to make voice
interfaces ubiquitous and as
natural as speaking to a
human. .. cutting-edge
techniques, like highly scalable
deep learning, to train our
speech models. ..virtually all
fields of human language
technology. This WIRED
article, which includes
interviews with several Alexa
scientists, provides good
insight into our customer-
centric approach to research
and development, as does this
interview with Rohit Prasad,
vice president and head
scientist, Amazon Alexa.
IBM Watson
Research labs for
Conversational AI
IBM Research is
tackling some of AI's
greatest challenges.
Our scientists and
engineers focus on
fundamental scientific
breakthroughs to help
guide the
advancement of AI.
Browse some of our
latest publications
spanning a wide range
of core AI disciplines.
Watson Assistant
is an offering for
building
conversational
interfaces into any
application, device, or
channel.

16. Page 16 Transforming the working world with knowledge tech
Are these letters, words or meaningful images? Optical character recognition (OCR),
voice/image recognition
What language is this?
Language translators
Recap: What does it mean to “sense and respond”?
What is this? What type of document?
(Is it a contract? Email? Letter? Article?)
Unitization, document
review, coding
Is there critical language? personally
identifiable information (PII)?
Data mining, indexing, Statistical
Machine Translation, Info Retrieval
Is the event or process “working”?
Can we improve it?
Pattern recognition and machine
learning, robotic logic, text
replacement, legal remedies, legal
hold, data loss prevention
Source: EY at KM World 2018SIKM Leaders Conversational AI

17. Public sphere: Google Perspective AI learns about tone, slang
• API uses machine learning models to score the perceived impact a comment might have on a
conversation. Developers and publishers can use this score to give real-time feedback to
commenters or help moderators
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 17https://www.perspectiveapi.com/#/

18. Public Sphere: Social listening
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 18
• Social listening involves finding
pattern matches against brands,
logos, celebrities or keywords, and
tracking them against demographics,
time, current events, and
competitors.
• Social image listening includes pulling
down and examining related images
Source: Crimson Hexagon 2019 US Consumer Trend Report
Social Media Today: How to create a Winning Social
Listening Strategy for 2019

19. Private Sphere: Microsoft Office Graph learns from your
interaction
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 19
Introduced in 2014, the Office Graph
(Microsoft Delve) continuously collects
and analyses signals that you and your
colleagues send when you work in
Office 365. Signals include:
• Working on the same doc
• Email
• Your manager
• Your colleagues
Delve organizes documents on your
home page according to what’s likely to
be most relevant to you right now. (Also
supports search)
Workplace Analytics lets managers see
patterns, MyAnalytics lets individuals
see patterns.

20. B2C or B2B or B2E: Chatbots range from
playback, to suggesting, to personalized
dialogue (illustrative)
General Inquiries
Handle basic customer
inquiries traditionally hidden in
FAQs.
Complex Inquiries
For requests that a Bot
cannot complete hand off to a
human agent.
Appointment Booking
Handle simple “anonymous”
tasks via chat, e.g. booking an
appointment.
Account Inquiry
Handle inquiries that
require identification of the
customer, e.g. account balance
enquiry
Make Payment
Perform actions that require a
user to be authenticated and
authorised, e.g. make payment
to predefined payee.
Self-service content
Take existing FAQs and
content,
enable staff to self-serve
knowledge via Bot.
Simple Customer Bots
Know-you Bots
Playback Bots
Advisor Bot
Assist a customer with a multi-
step process, solve a problem
IT Helpdesk
Report an IT problem and
check the status. Bot can
provide self-help and
escalate to engineer if
required.
Future:
Dialogue
?
Source: EY research
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI

21. New Frontiers in Conversational AI
Context switching
Intent recognition
Full spectrum of signals
Open Source
Our better selves
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 21

22. New frontiers in conversational AI: Context switching
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 22
“How do you really carry context throughout a dialogue? This is
the biggest challenge. A lot of how you understand what I’m
saying depends on what I said maybe five sentences ago, or
fifteen sentences ago. You’re building up a state of the
conversation.”
Satinder Singh, Director of the
Artificial Intelligence Lab
at the University of Michigan.
Source: Kore.ai
Source: IBM
(Hold and resume concept (Kore.ai))

23. New frontiers in conversational AI: Intent recognition
example: Sarcasm
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 23
Check out Indian Institute of Technology research
Sarcasm Suite
Source: Quartz (2016) and NVDia
Humans don’t always recognize it! It
requires context (speaker, situation,
world)
Approaches:
1. Machine learning (volume, then
phrase matching / information
retrieval)
2. Rules (e.g., unexpected
juxtaposition, exaggeration)
3. Deep learning

24. New frontiers in conversational AI: Conversational AI for
full spectrum of human communication
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 24
Our interactions will be
way more conversational,
much more multi-modal.
Apps will be able to pick up
on our gestures, our facial
expressions, our emotions,
what is being said in our
voice.”
Gabi Zijderveld,
Chief Marketing Officer,
Affectiva
Source: IBM
Scientists have found a way to decode brain
signals into speech
It’s a step towards a system that would let
people send texts straight from their brains.
by Antonio Regalado Technology Review
Apr 24, 2019
Google’s AI can now translate your speech
while keeping your voice
Researchers trained a neural network to map
audio “voiceprints” from one language to
another.
by Karen Hao Technology Review
May 20, 2019

25. New frontiers in conversational AI: Open source code
working from open-source content
Example: Stanford Question and
Answer Dataset SQaD
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 25
Stanford Question Answering Dataset
(SQuAD) is a reading comprehension dataset,
consisting of questions posed by crowdworkers
on a set of Wikipedia articles, where the answer
to every question is a segment of text, or span,
from the corresponding reading passage, or the
question might be unanswerable.
Leader Board has coders who have taken both
the question and the text and interpreted them
effectively.
Source: SQaD

26. New frontiers in conversational AI : Proposal to use AI
to nudge us into better conversation behaviors
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 26
Disciplines that lead to productive conversation, growing social capital,
and innovation.
1. "integrity" (asking clean questions, having a sense of one's truth)
2. “courtesy” (respecting others and the forum)
3. “inclusion” (drawing people in/not excluding through acronyms)
4. “translation” (making sense of the discussion's flow and meaning
and summarizing).
(See short article. http://sps.columbia.edu/information-and-knowledge-
strategy/news/four-discussion-disciplines-drive-effective-online )
Let's use AI to detect good discussion “moves” and applaud them, or to detect
their absence and "nudge." We could also watch how these play out across email
and enterprise social networks, and improve how we converse.

27. New frontiers in conversational AI: Can Conversational AI help
collaboration?
27
What if
humans were
augmented or
nudged to
improve the
tone or
accuracy?
SIKM Leaders Conversational AISIKM Leaders Conversational AI
What if
wisdom
were
compiled
and
presented
back in
aggregate?
SIKM Leaders at KM World, 2018

28. Your view?
What’s our responsibility on this
topic as a KM community?
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 28

29. Opportunities and risks
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 29
Conversation Conversational AI AI: Opportunity or Risk?
Collective intelligence Crowdsourced, multi-sourced
content
O: Super-human
R: Bias
Voice, inflection, pitch “Data,” including these, plus history,
comparables, other factors
O: Super-human
R: manipulation
Mindfulness Context awareness O: Helps the forgetful
R: De-humanizes
Intention (personal purpose) Intention (goal) O: May help complete
R: Absolves responsibility
Container (trust) History (intelligence) O/R: Trust can be broken
Affect “Sentiment” O: Can reduce extremism
R: Can be manipulated
Emergence Randomness O: Innovation
R: Lose the human will
Accountability, shared fate,
shared faith
Shaming, isolation O: Enforce/remind
R: Lose the higher power

30. Our work-life is just a series of
conversations.
Let's live and interact intentionally.
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 30

31. Resources
• IBM, How conversation (with context) will usher in the AI future
https://www.ibm.com/watson/advantage-reports/future-of-artificial-intelligence/ai-conversation.html
• Nanalyze, Conversational AI Examples (featuring Clinc)
https://www.nanalyze.com/2019/06/conversational-ai-enterprise-applications/
• Nanalyze, “Latest trends in AI” https://www.nanalyze.com/2019/03/latest-trends-artificial-intelligence/
• Forrester Wave on Conversational AI, June, 2019.
https://www.forrester.com/report/The+Forrester+New+Wave+Conversational+AI+For+Customer+Servic
e+Q2+2019/-/E-RES144416
• Columbia University, Four discussion disciplines http://sps.columbia.edu/information-and-knowledge-
strategy/news/four-discussion-disciplines-drive-effective-online
• Stanford Stanford Question Answering Dataset SQaD
• Technology Review, Scientists have found a way to decode brain signals into speech It’s a step towards a
system that would let people send texts straight from their brains. by Antonio Regalado Technology
Review, Apr 24, 2019
• Technology Review, Google’s AI can now translate your speech while keeping your voice Researchers
trained a neural network to map audio “voiceprints” from one language to another. by Karen Hao
Technology Review May 20, 2019
• Quartz, “Snark Attack,” Quartz (2016)
• Context Switching and the Hold and resume concept (Kore.ai))
SIKM Leaders Conversational AI 31