RightNow Applies Cutting-Edge Artificial Intelligence Research to Real-World Business Challenges
Bozeman, MT (October 11, 2006) — RightNow(R) Technologies (NASDAQ: RNOW) today announced RightNow Labs, a research and development group tasked with applying the latest breakthroughs in academic artificial intelligence (AI) research to the company’s suite of enterprise service, sales and marketing solutions.
The RightNow Labs team follows cutting-edge developments in AI fields such as adaptive clustering, fuzzy logic, natural language processing and genetic algorithms, and has incorporated aspects of these advancements into the company’s software development efforts. The company has been granted five patents for technology applications resulting from the efforts of the RightNow Labs unit, with five more pending – significantly outpacing competitors in delivering innovative solutions that provide substantial benefits to users.
RightNow has applied aspects of biomimicry, which analyzes and imitates models and mechanisms from nature, to address business issues. For example, in the study of swarm intelligence, scientists analyze how decentralized groups, such as ant colonies, collectively achieve goals, such as locating food. As members of an ant colony search for food, they lay down scent trails. When food is found, ants retrace their trails to alert others, adding more scent to lead others to the food. RightNow uses an analogous approach in its software to lead users to specific information stored in its knowledge foundation. The paths by which successive users navigate the RightNow knowledge foundation are appropriately weighted, based on their success in finding what they were seeking. In this way, the RightNow knowledgebase automatically “learns” how to best guide subsequent users to the most relevant information.
Adaptive clustering – another form of AI that has been incorporated into RightNow’s technology – tracks the way individual elements relate to each other spatially or logically as they form groups. Through adaptive clustering techniques, RightNow’s solutions associate certain words with specific blocks of information and automatically deliver that information to users, while eliminating the need for system administrators to structure and categorize information before deployment.
“For nearly a decade, RightNow has made significant investments in research and development to ensure that we provide clients with solutions that fully leverage the very latest scientific advances,” said Greg Gianforte, president and CEO of RightNow. “We created RightNow Labs to explore the latest academic research and incorporate applicable concepts into our software development process.”
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