Oration by Convai has officially surpassed 100 million conversations.
Oration by Convai was first introduced to Australian and New Zealand contact centres in July 2020. One of the first AI systems of its kind ever to be deployed in the local market, Oration uses advanced speech recognition and Convai’s AI language interpreter to understand caller intent and create amazing caller conversations.
In the five years since the product was developed, Oration has saved Convai’s clients 500,000 contact centre hours and surpassed 100 million conversations in Australia and New Zealand. This is a remarkable milestone. It shows the real-world value of agentic AI platforms, but it’s not the whole – or even most important – part of the story. What really matters is what those 100 million conversations have taught us consistently over the past five years.
Oration was built around the understanding that the fundamentals of customer conversations have not changed over the past 30 years, nor have the things that make customers happy. The three questions at the heart of every customer conversation are still the same: “What do you want? Who are you? Can I do that for you?”
Based on the answers to these questions, calls can be resolved on the spot, or fast-tracked to the most appropriate outcome, whether that’s intelligent self-service or an agent who has the right context and ability to solve the customer’s problem.
For most of Oration’s history, our strength was in answering the first two questions at scale, with speed and accuracy. The third question – and key to fully automating the outcome – was doable in some cases, but complex interactions often needed a human agent to complete the job.
Over the years, many technologies have promised to fundamentally rewrite customer interactions. None of them has. What has changed is how much of that interaction AI can reliably handle before a human agent needs to step in.
Today, Oration can authenticate callers, capture and confirm key details, interpret free-form speech, register emotion and urgency, and complete common transactions end-to-end. If a request is too complex to handle, it knows to transfer the call to a human agent – the right human agent, avoiding the need for the dreaded internal transfer with the contact centre.
Appointment booking is a good example of how far the technology has come.
Previously, if a customer called to book their car in for a service, an automated system could identify the caller and understand their request, but the booking itself would be handed to an agent. That’s where Agentic AI comes in.
Oration can now hold a natural back-and-forth conversation, applying constraints – for example, around available appointment slots – and understand conversational nuance. If the caller says “first thing in the morning” or “as early as possible”, Oration interprets the meaning and is able to complete the booking.
Importantly, it’s really only that final step that’s changing – the breadth of outcomes that can be reliably automated before a human steps in. Critically, Oration is able to understand quickly when the request has become too complex and must be handed off to a human.
Too many organisations over-reach on their contact centre’s CX outcomes by trying to go fully agentic and automate everything at once.
Get the identity and intent of every call right, and everything else becomes easier. Skip those steps, and your CX quickly falls apart as you force your customers to become guinea pigs for your beta testing, costing them time and ultimately, costing you reputation and revenue. A customer with a problem should be an opportunity to surprise and delight, not a cost to be minimised at the expense of experience.
The contact centres using Oration have collectively reclaimed more than half a million hours. These gains haven’t come from going fully agentic overnight. One hundred million conversations has shown us that real CX improvement comes from incremental progress – 15 or 30 seconds saved on every call, each day.
Auckland Co-operative Taxi Society has seen that effect first-hand after more than 15 years as a Convai client. Across its New Zealand fleet, Oration now automates more than 30,000 bookings every month.
The success Oration has achieved over the past five years reinforces Convai’s position as one of Australia’s most experienced and scaled AI organisations.
To learn more about Oration, or to explore where agentic AI can safely automate outcomes in your contact centre, contact Convai.