IBM Watson and Autodesk reinvent customer service

VB EVENT: Every year, companies spend 1.3 trillion dollars on 265 billion customer service calls. That’s five bucks a call. On average, the cost to find and hire a call center agent costs $4000 (not including salary), with an additional $4,800 for training — and with frustrated agents tending to drop like flies in the face of an often brutally stressful job, these costs mount up.
AI, or what IBM calls cognitive computing, is changing that. Autodesk began piloting the IBM Watson Conve