Volume, the AI Agency & Gartner-recognised leader in the development of Conversational AI Platforms (CAPs), is a technology-agnostic developer of experiential artificial intelligence (EAI) solutions. Focusing on the three key pillars of EAI, Volume creates immersive experiences using Conversational AI Platforms, humanoid robots and virtual-/augmented-reality solutions for businesses looking to improve customer experience.

In this fireside chat, we'll discuss how artificial intelligence and robotics is changing the world with Chris Sykes Founder, CEO & Head of AI & Robotics at Volume and Benoit Alvarez CTO and Managing Director of CogCom (Volume's wholly-owned subsidiary in Colombo, Sri Lanka)

About Chris Sykes

Chris founded Volume in 1997 with the vision that technology would rapidly permeate the sales and marketing operations of the future. Aligned to this vision was Volume’s lighthouse client, Dell. Dell was an early pioneer in the use of the internet and Volume scaled its capabilities to support Dell’s 23 EMEA Business Units. Chris was instrumental in helping Dell move from a print-to-inventory model to print-on-demand through an online portal that housed Dell’s digital marketing assets in raw and pre-compiled formats. In 2000, Chris founded Then (UK) Ltd a developer of Marketing Resource Management (MRM) software. In 2002, Then (UK) Ltd was recognised by Gartner and appeared in its 2002/03 MRM Magic Quadrant, as a niche vendor. Then (UK) Ltd was acquired by Aprimo inc. the only vendor named as ‘leader’ in the MRM Magic Quadrant in July 2004. Chris exited Then (UK) Ltd and continued to spearhead Volume. As a futurist, Chris took the decision in 2015 to pivot the business towards Artificial Intelligence and looked at how it could be applied within a sales, marketing and customer experience context. Chris coined the term ‘experiential AI’ and has since built the three pillar that underpin EAI – AI-powered Conversational Platforms, Humanoid Robotics & VR devices and Augmented Reality.

About Benoit Alvarez

Benoit joined Volume 13 years ago and is responsible for developing Volume’s AI capabilities. In 2017, Benoit certified from Machine Learning (Stanford University), as well as Neural Networks and Deep Learning curricula from Andrew Ng. Benoit also manages the UK Innovation Lab and the Colombo Centre of Cognitive Computing (CogCom) – a team of 40 people including UX, developers, AI developers, Data modellers and Digital Project Managers. Benoit graduated from Bourges University in France with a Masters in Digital Design Engineering in 1998. He worked for the International Centre of Radio Astronomy in Nançay studying Saturn and for Thales Defence working on on-board software for missiles, before completing a second Masters in 2001 in software design and development. Benoit is the chief architect and engineer behind QBOX™, a patent-pending tool that improves performance and scales conversational AI platforms and smart chatbots: the technology-agnostic corpus-management tool that automatically measures the quality of natural-language data models.