New AI-powered suite boosts Teradata's CX capabilities

New capabilities

Agents are a major ongoing trend in AI development.

Teradata turned decades of solving customer use case problems and scaling analytics plumbing to deliver a revenue engine. Autonomous Customer Intelligence [is] evolutionary under the hood but strategically builds atop Teradata's hybrid cloud analytics platform to become a decision automation engine.

For the first year and a half after ChatGPT's launch, enterprises focused on building chatbots for users to query and analyze data using natural language instead of code. For the first time, such applications expanded the use of analytics within organizations beyond a small percentage of experts to non-technical employees.

Midway through 2024, agents began to emerge. Agents have contextual awareness and reasoning capabilities that enable them to act autonomously, unlike chatbots, which require human prompts. Since then, enterprises have focused much of their development on agentic AI.

In response, many of the data management vendors that created environments for developing GenAI have added agentic AI development capabilities as well. Databricks and Snowflake were at the forefront, with others including Teradata following suit.

Now, Teradata is extending its agentic AI capabilities to its CX capabilities with Autonomous Customer Intelligence.

A recent survey sponsored by Teradata and conducted by NewtonX found that 61% of enterprises plan to increase their investments in CX, including customer insight tools powered by AI. Autonomous Customer Intelligence is aimed at providing users with CX insights that Teradata has collected since it was founded in 1979 augmented by AI, according to Sumeet Arora, the vendor's chief product officer. 

"With Teradata’s four decades of experience in delivering real ROI from trusted data, particularly in the areas of customer journey and customer 360, we wanted to extend that knowledge to the world of AI," he said.

Meanwhile, because the new suite combines intellectual property with AI, it provides valuable capabilities, according to Stephen Catanzano, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia.

"Autonomous Customer Intelligence represents a nice addition because it transforms Teradata from a traditional analytics platform into an autonomous decision-making system that can act in real-time on customer data at enterprise scale," he said.

Specific features of Autonomous Customer Intelligence include the following:

• Integration with AgentBuilder, featuring an MCP server, native access to Teradata's analytics and data management platforms and Teradata Agents -- prebuilt templates for building agents to take on specific tasks.
• Enterprise Vector Store to retrieve both structured and unstructured data that feeds the retrieval-augmented generation pipelines many organizations use to train AI applications.
• Reusable data products built on integrated data and enabled by prebuilt models organizing customer behavior.
• An analytics layer to detect patterns and predict outcomes.
• Signals, an intelligence layer that automatically detects and analyzes customer behavior in real time and embeds its discoveries in Teradata's Vantage Customer Experience platform, where those discoveries feed automated actions.
• AI for CX Use Case Solution -- prebuilt tools for specific customer relations tasks.
• Services to aid Teradata users deploying the vendor's Customer Intelligence Framework, including data engineering and pipeline management.

AgentBuilder and the vector store are highlights, according to Ni. He also noted that the full swath of features comprising Autonomous Customer Intelligence work well together.

"Autonomous Customer Intelligence is well thought-out through framework spanning data products, needed context and analytics … as well as the signals, analytics and agents," Ni said.

Meanwhile, from a competitive standpoint, Teradata isn't breaking new ground with Autonomous Customer Intelligence, given that vendors such as Databricks and Snowflake also provide industry-specific capabilities, he continued. However, the new suite's integration with other Teradata features could be unique.

"Teradata is entering a competitive field of hyperscalers, startups and global systems integrators offering domain and industry solutions like Autonomous Customer Intelligence," Ni said. "Teradata's differentiation lies in where the intelligence runs. In this case, that means inside the trusted platform and not bolted onto it."

Catanzano noted that Teradata's decades of intellectual property could prove a difference-maker.

"While competitors offer AI agents and customer analytics capabilities, Teradata's integration of four decades of industry-specific IP with autonomous agents operating across the entire data-to-action pipeline appears to be a potential differentiator," he said.

Highlights of Autonomous Customer Intelligence include Signals and AgentBuilder, Catanzano added..

Looking ahead

With Autonomous Customer Intelligence now available, Teradata's product development focus will be on adding more capabilities that enable customers to develop and deploy agents, according to Arora.

Focusing on agents is wise, according to Catanzano. But rather than merely providing customers with additional agent-building capabilities, he suggested the vendor create a marketplace where users can access prebuilt agents that address specific needs.

"Teradata could develop industry-specific autonomous intelligence marketplaces where customers can access prebuilt agents and signals tailored to their vertical -- retail, financial services, healthcare," Catanzano said.

Expanding its CX suite to address all customer touchpoints could be beneficial, he continued. "This would position them as the go-to platform for enterprises seeking both autonomous intelligence and industry expertise," Catanzano said.

Ni, meanwhile, suggested that Teradata expand analytics tools such as Autonomous Customer Experience to more critical business processes than CX.

"Teradata can reach new customers by expanding analytics solutions like Autonomous Customer Intelligence to more critical business use cases, and doing so on its trusted, hybrid infrastructure," he said.

Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.