Hi Dave, please tell us a little bit about your role at Upwork. How do you work with AI and other intelligent technologies to build workplace tools?

As GM of Marketplace and VP of Product at Upwork, I oversee the overall product strategy and execution of Upwork’s marketplace, connecting talent and clients all over the world. I lead multiple teams responsible for delivering value to clients who rely on Upwork’s global work marketplace to find and hire the best talent. While we are still in the early days, the rapid rate of change ushered in by Generative AI is certainly impacting both the ways we work to build products, as well as the very products we are building for our customers.

We very much see generative AI as the newest capability in our product development toolkit, and a massive force multiplier for both businesses and talent who come to our marketplace to find and get work done. One of our most ambitious goals is to foster the most AI-empowered independent talent in the world.

As announced on November 6, we are providing both the best third- and first-party tools and educational resources to enable talent to harness the power of generative AI to work smarter, and ultimately get more done. One example of this is the launch of Upwork Chat Pro, a new GPT-4-powered app currently live as a limited-release beta and developed by our Upwork Labs team to allow professionals to start and complete work faster and more effectively.

How has Upwork evolved in the GPT era? What are your key offerings in the AI space?

At Upwork, we’re seeing firsthand the transformative impact generative AI is having on professionals and companies alike, supercharging productivity and efficiency for talent and businesses that need to get mission-critical work done.

AI is the fastest-growing category on our platform this year. Our goal is to become the preeminent destination for AI-related talent and work, while also improving the efficiency, effectiveness, and speed to match on our platform through improvements to our core product experiences and capabilities.

We first welcomed the era of generative AI at Upwork with the launch of the AI Services hub, a singular destination for customers to source the AI talent they need, and get matched with AI-powered solutions and expert talent across virtually every category of work. We also aim to ensure talent on Upwork has access to the most modern generative AI tools to dramatically increase productivity and quality of work. The AI Services hub has seen a 10x increase in average monthly visitors since it debuted in July.

Recently, we built on our offerings with the announcement of an extension of the hub with a new suite of generative AI apps, offers and educational content specially designed for talent this week.

Could you tell us more about your latest generative AI offerings? How do you differentiate your AI apps in the education marketplace?

As I shared above, we introduced a new set of AI apps and offers, alongside new educational content so that independent talent on Upwork can harness the power of generative AI to supercharge their productivity and improve the quality of their work.

Additionally, we launched limited access to Upwork Chat Pro, a new generative AI application embedded directly on Upwork’s platform and powered by GPT-4, developed to allow independent professionals to start and complete work faster and more effectively.

Upwork’s unique position as a two-sided marketplace allows us to introduce our global talent pool to a comprehensive array of best-of-breed AI-based tools and resources. We are partnering with industry-leading developers like Adobe, Amazon, ClickUp, and Miro, that have incorporated Gen AI into their products.

In making these tools available for trial or discount, we are ensuring that our talented professionals have every opportunity to leverage AI tools to do their best work.

In addition to offering these apps to independent talent, our learning center, Upwork Academy, is adding educational content in the new AI Education Library, including AI-related courses, AI learning paths that cover the basics of AI, as well as mini courses. It’s this combination of apps, tools and educational resources for talent that will help upskill their capabilities and leverage the power of generative AI so they stay competitive and become more productive.

What has been your most memorable experience related to Generative AI capabilities in 2023?

Upwork has been fueled by cutting-edge technologies since the company started more than 20 years ago.

We were founded on the idea that technology could break down barriers and borders and bring people together to unleash their uniquely human potential to work together in ways made possible by the technological advances of the last few decades.

Think about the most significant technology shifts in our lifetime – from personal computers to the Web, mobile devices, and cloud computing as the foundational building blocks underlying our own work marketplace.

Today, we’re undergoing another seismic shift with the advent of generative AI and how it will directly impact the future of work. I am particularly excited about the transformative possibilities already unfolding for professionals and businesses tapping into generative AI.

It’s a game-changer for work, and for Upwork, as we seek to help so many professionals and companies embrace this moment of opportunity to deliver major critical business outcomes and ultimately work smarter and more efficiently. It’s truly an awesome and memorable experience to be at a company that is working tirelessly towards empowering millions of professionals to embrace the power of generative AI to continuously serve their respective customers.

Thank you, Dave! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.

• About Dave Bottoms
• About Upwork

About Dave Bottoms

Dave Bottoms leads Upwork’s Marketplace organization, a global team responsible for the core Talent Marketplace, search & discovery, ads & monetization, core mobile experiences, as well as new product innovation and analytics.

About Upwork

Upwork is the world’s largest work marketplace that connects businesses with independent talent from across the globe. We serve everyone from one-person startups to large, Fortune 100 enterprises with a powerful, trust-driven platform that enables companies and talent to work together in new ways that unlock their potential. Our talent community earned over $3.8 billion on Upwork in 2022 across more than 10,000 skills in categories including website & app development, creative & design, customer support, finance & accounting, consulting, and operations.

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Cloud and AI: A Symbiotic Journey

Businesses are making strides in a variety of non-IT areas, thanks to the combination of AI and cloud computing.

By 2026, the cloud computing industry is expected to expand from its present size to $947 billion.

Meanwhile, the artificial intelligence market is expected to rise from its current size to $309 billion, an increase of more than 5 times.

We have abundant examples to quote if we look around. This seamless integration allows a wide range of tasks, such as searching, playing music, and making purchases, and Alexa by Google and Siri by Apple are only two examples. In order to train an ML model’s algorithm, massive amounts of data are required.

Dropbox is a service for storing and sharing files online. Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform that may be used for hosting, backup, and disaster recovery. Rackspace provides cloud computing, data storage, and security.

The future can be predicted by AI since it learns from the past. Combining AI with cloud computing opens up machine learning algorithms to the vast amounts of data accessible on the cloud, which may aid in their growing comprehension of the challenges at hand.

Every day, we rely on cloud-based services like email, calendars, zoom, and messaging apps like WhatsApp. They store our information in the cloud so that it is always available online, a feature made possible by the ubiquitous nature of the Internet.

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Pega’s world-class intelligent automation and generative AI helps financial institutions more efficiently orchestrate rising number of cases

Pegasystems Inc. the low-code platform provider empowering the world’s leading enterprises to Build for Change, announced the Pega Financial Crime and Alerts Investigation Management Accelerator, a new solution that helps financial institutions manage the rising number of risk alerts and more efficiently orchestrate investigations. By leveraging Pega’s proven intelligent automation and case management capabilities along with its groundbreaking generative AI-powered capabilities, financial institutions can break through operational silos and speed investigations for what is traditionally a time-intensive and manual process.

Financial crimes – such as fraud, money laundering, structuring, and sanctions violations –are rapidly rising, putting increasing strain on financial institutions’ risk teams to investigate each potential incident. While detection and monitoring systems have matured, financial institutions still struggle to manage the increasing volume of these alerts and investigations, which have been further exacerbated by global economic sanctions. Compounding this problem, risk teams from different departments often work in silos and use different monitoring and case management tools, making it difficult to get a consolidated picture of all risks related to each customer. This can lead to inefficient and duplicative processes, unnecessary manual work, and inconsistent outcomes.

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The Pega Financial Crime and Alerts Investigation Management Accelerator provides financial institutions with a unified solution to manage alerts and drive investigations for all types of risk detection systems across all departments, jurisdictions, and lines of business. The accelerator provides a holistic, transparent, and actionable view of each customer’s risk profile in a single application, helping drive more collaboration for even the largest and most complex financial institutions. And with Pega’s leading intelligent automation and AI, financial institutions can streamline their investigations, resulting in faster resolutions, lower costs, and better outcomes for their customers.

Pega Financial Crime and Alerts Investigation Management Accelerator provides any financial institution the following key features and benefits:

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• Smarter process orchestration with case management and intelligent automation: Pega enables all types of alerts across different monitoring systems to be captured and triaged in a consistent manner so investigators can spend their time examining the case rather than gathering and managing information. The accelerator digests and enriches alerts, deduplicates redundant alerts, and merges new alerts into existing investigation cases when applicable. Cases are assigned with skill-based routing to the most appropriate risk investigator, who is guided through the right stages and steps to efficiently and accurately handle each case.
  
  
• Reduced time and costs with automation and AI: By using automation and AI to reduce manual labor, Pega helps drive investigations faster and more accurately. For example, the accelerator eliminates the time-consuming and cumbersome process of developing a Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR) by using generative AI to analyze all data associated with a case and then automatically draft the SAR. Automation is applied throughout the process, helping staff drive more efficient and effective investigations.
  
  
• Increased flexibility with configurable system options: The accelerator is highly configurable, allowing financial institutions to leverage pre-built process templates out of the box and easily adjust and extend them to fit their unique needs. The accelerator can be integrated with existing alert monitoring and detection systems as well as Pega’s Know Your Customer and Client Lifecycle Management solutions and other third-party systems and services.

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Pega’s low-code platform for AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation is trusted by the majority of the world’s largest financial institutions. For more than 30 years, Pega has provided global financial institutions with case management, workflow automation, and customer risk solutions across KYC, AML, alert management, fraud, account opening, and client lifecycle management. Pega supports all types of financial institutions with pre-defined industry best practices across jurisdictions and lines of business.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]

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What good is enterprise process automation to an organization without AI?

Alternatively, what wins can an organization achieve and maintain with AI sans process automation?

While companies can experience a solid boost to employee productivity with one or the other, they will need the power of generative AI to reap long-term benefits of process automation—a combination of technologies dubbed “intelligent automation.” It’s how things will get done in companies moving forward.

AI has been at the forefront of business leaders’ minds and strategies for some time.

Consider the results of the 2022 McKinsey Global Survey on AI, which found that AI adoption doubled over the past five years. Now, relatively recent innovations in generative AI have boosted organizational interest in the technology and the benefits it offers, as found by a Gartner poll.

In fact, according to our 2023 survey of 1,000 business leaders, more than three in five organizations (63%) have already deployed AI and machine learning, while two in five (40%) have deployed generative AI. The survey also found that 88% of respondents see AI, machine learning, and generative AI as key technologies to enable successful process automation. Their investments are following suit, with 72% reporting that their organization will invest in intelligent automation in the next 12 months, and the average company spending $5.6 million on intelligent automation in 2023—a 17% increase over 2022 spending.

Why are AI and process automation critical for organizations to deploy in complement? It helps to think of AI as the “brain” and automation as the “hands” of the process. With AI alone—even generative AI—only so much can be accomplished. A human employee can prompt AI to analyze data or create content, but that’s where the activity ends, leaving the employee to take any required next steps. Intelligent automation creates the opportunity to free up more of that employee’s time for value-adding work, and can handle processes end to end.

For instance, using AI, an enterprise can analyze its organizational data to identify processes that are ripe for intelligent automation. Based on the information gleaned, the team can then establish virtual assistants—the top use case for intelligent automation, cited by 68% of business leaders—to help automate those identified processes.

Additionally, intelligent automation forms a comprehensive loop of scalable activity, with the “brain” of AI continuing to inform and enhance the activities that the “hands” of process automation execute. It’s also worth noting that 82% of the leaders we surveyed say their organization supports citizen development, putting the power of this technology directly into the hands of employees, no specialists needed.

An organization’s success with intelligent automation is dependent on two essential things, based on the findings of our annual survey.

First, the vast majority of business leaders (84%) agree that intelligent automation initiatives must be developed with business objectives in mind.

Second, an equal percentage (84%) say that a complete and connected automation platform is required to drive success at scale. When done right, intelligent automation can help organizations check both of these boxes, offering a critical pair of technologies that can enable companies to achieve even greater productivity in the new system of work than if they adopted one alone.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]

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“We are thrilled to introduce these automation and analytics capabilities to our Alluvio Unified Observability Platform”

With the ever-increasing complexity of modern IT environments, organizations are grappling with a flood of data and alerts, often leading to information overload and difficulty in prioritizing and addressing crucial incidents. Alluvio’s automation and analytics capabilities revolutionize the way IT teams handle unified observability and incident management, streamlining workflows, and allowing for a more proactive approach to IT operations.

The automation and analytics capabilities, integrated seamlessly into the Alluvio Unified Observability Platform, enable organizations to automate repetitive tasks, analyze vast volumes of data, and correlate events across various monitoring tools, bringing unprecedented efficiency and accuracy to incident resolution. By automating manual processes, teams can shift their focus from routine and mundane tasks to more strategic and value-added activities, driving innovation and optimizing service delivery.

In this new Alluvio portfolio release, there are four key use cases of intelligent automation that extract critical insights across Alluvio monitoring data and existing third-party tools to enable faster time to resolution and deliver an improved digital employee experience (DEX):

• Incident response: Is now made easier with runbooks that automate troubleshooting by replicating the best practices of IT experts with access to more data from Alluvio and third-party solutions. Alluvio IQ replicates advanced investigative processes by correlating real-time granular performance data and leveraging automated investigations to gather context from Alluvio and third-party telemetry, filter out noise, and set priorities—reducing the volume of alerts to the most business critical. By bringing together Alluvio Network Performance Management (NPM) and Digital Experience Management (DEM) telemetry with third-party data, intelligent correlation, and workflow automation, Alluvio IQ now securely delivers context-rich, actionable insights that empower IT to resolve complex issues before users are impacted.

• Intelligent ServiceNow ticketing: With this update, IT is empowered with automated ticket generation that is prioritized, up to date, and contains all the context IT needs to quickly remediate, directly from ServiceNow. The integrations between ServiceNow and Alluvio products uniquely replicate advanced investigative processes and provides service desk agents and network operation centers context-driven insights directly into their ServiceNow UI.

• Security forensics automation: Alluvio IQ bridges the gap between NetOps and SecOps, leveraging automation to distill forensic data from the Alluvio NPM portfolio for use in traditional security tools, like SIEMs and SOARs. SecOps teams want easy access to all data sources and to integrate that data into their security tools. With this latest update, Alluvio IQ provides out-of-the-box runbooks for security investigations and threat hunting. These runbooks provide SecOps teams with easy access to Alluvio NPM data to help SecOps fully investigate threats with more context, reducing risk to the business.

• Desktop remediations: Alluvio Aternity has existing automation for desktop remediations, and this capability is now being enhanced with Alluvio’s LogiQ engine. Now in Private Beta, Alluvio’s logic engine replicates expert workflows, gathering more context for desktop issues, intelligently selecting a remediation, or routing the issues to other tools in the ecosystem such as chatbots or ITSM tools.

“We are thrilled to introduce these automation and analytics capabilities to our Alluvio Unified Observability Platform,” said Richard Tworek, Chief Technology Officer, Alluvio at Riverbed. “We understand the challenges faced by IT teams in managing complex environments and the importance of shifting left. By automating routine tasks, we aim to free up valuable time and resources, allowing teams to concentrate on the most critical issues and keep their essential applications running smoothly so organizations can deliver superior digital employee experience.”

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The integration of Alluvio’s automation capabilities with leading ITSM tools further enhances the value proposition for customers. By centralizing information within a familiar and efficient ITSM platform, organizations can leverage existing workflows, processes, and incident management procedures. This integration eliminates silos, improves collaboration, and enables better communication between IT teams, ultimately leading to faster incident resolution and improved service delivery and DEX.

“Next-generation observability leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate fixes of basic and complex IT issues, while providing data-rich context for issues that require human intervention,” said Shamus McGillicuddy, Vice President of Research at Enterprise Management Associates. “Riverbed’s release of intelligent automation workflows across its Alluvio Unified Observability portfolio provides the right data for the right insights so that IT teams can improve and accelerate IT operations and security incident response.”

The Alluvio Unified Observability platform is a secure, highly available and scalable SaaS platform for cloud-native observability services, such as Alluvio IQ. The platform is part of the Alluvio Unified Observability portfolio from Riverbed, which also includes industry-leading visibility tools for Network Performance Management (NPM), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (ITIM) and Digital Experience Management (DEM), which encompasses application performance management (APM) and end user experience monitoring (EUEM). Alluvio automates the process of gathering and correlating metrics across time, device, location, and applications. It also provides automated investigative workflows designed to replicate the best practices of expert IT teams—enabling enterprises to filter out noise, reduce escalations, set priorities, and scale knowledge residing in the minds of a few across the broader IT team.

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 [To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com] 

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Leveraging Amazon SageMaker with Amazon Bedrock, Automation Anywhere will allow thousands of customers to immediately take full advantage of its suite of enhanced intelligent automation services

Automation Anywhere, the #1 leader in cloud-native intelligent automation, announced it is working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring intelligent automation and generative AI innovations to market. Leveraging Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, a service that delivers open-source, pre-trained models and Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service from AWS that makes pre-trained Foundation Models (FMs) easily accessible via an API, Automation Anywhere will offer customers with greater choice, flexibility and reliability for their generative AI deployments.

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“Our vision has always been to make automation accessible to everyone, anywhere,” said Mihir Shukla, CEO, and Co-Founder. “Putting our cloud-native Automation Success Platform on AWS was the first step, and now through intelligent automation fused with generative AI on AWS we enable every employee in every company with the potential to transform business and reshape the way we live and work.”

Working together since 2017, Automation Anywhere previously launched its cloud-native RPA solution on AWS. The years-long relationship between Automation Anywhere and AWS has evolved from core infrastructure to the application layer with AI. Automation Anywhere will now develop generative AI powered solutions in customer experience, document processing and contact center intelligence using Amazon SageMaker Jumpstart, Amazon Bedrock, and other AWS AI and ML services, further strengthening the go-to-market relationship.

“At AWS, our goal is to make it easy, practical, and cost-effective for customers to use generative AI capabilities across their business,” said Vasi Philomin, Vice President, Generative AI at AWS. “We are excited for customers to take advantage of our generative AI innovations to help reimagine customers experiences, boost productivity, and bring creative ideas to life.”

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“We already have deployed thousands of Automation Anywhere cloud native bots running on AWS,” said Luciano de Carvalho, Automation Executive Manager at ITAU Bank, the largest bank in Brazil and LATAM. “We are very excited that AWS and Automation Anywhere are working together to combine Generative AI with Intelligent Automation.”

Automation Anywhere has joined the AWS Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Accelerate Program, a co-sell program for AWS Partners that provides software solutions that run on or integrate with AWS. The program helps AWS Partners drive new business by directly connecting participating ISVs with the AWS Sales organization. The AWS ISV Accelerate Program provides Automation Anywhere with co-sell support and benefits to meet customer needs through collaboration with AWS field sellers globally. Co-selling provides better customer outcomes and assures mutual commitment from AWS and its partners.

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 [To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com] 

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