On Nexus 2025 - Cognigy Summit

This year in March we attended the Cognigy summit, Nexus 2025, in Düsseldorf. Cognigy is one is Germanys most interesting AI startups, focusing on chatbots, intelligent agents and callcenter automations. Personally we've only gotten to entry level at developing cognigy solutions, but we have close ties to some true cognigy experts and have gathered enough understanding of both cognigy and chatbots in general, to formulate opinions about it. The event was packed with companies talking about how they implemented chatbots in their organizations, what successes they saw and how they overcame challenges. In this blog post we want to highlight three aspects we saw there that we found most interesting. 

Nexus was choosen as a name because it is a connection point.
The event was hosted at Maritim Hotel next to Düsseldorf Airport DUS.

Outbound calling at Santander: There was a talk by Santander about how they implemented a voice bot that calls potential customers, I.e. people who have taken a first step on their website towards getting a loan. Loan counseling is still done by their consultants, but calling the number to 1) check if someone picks up, 2) is still interested in the loan and 3) has the time right now for a counseling, is done by their bot. If the bot does reach an interested client, who does not have the time right now, it offers to set up an appointment. They were excited about their consultants being way more efficient with ~85% of unreachable calls filtered out by their bot. They also talked about how they made the conscious decision to give the bot a voice that doesn't hide the fact that it is a bot.They felt they don't want tricking customers into thinking they are talking with a human when they aren't, which we found respectable as it also aligns with the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act.

Santanders bot is called Santi. Pretty much every company have their own bot, with its own name. 

Agentic over rule-based bots at flix: A big question that we've been debating with colleagues and customers alike is whether and when to use agentic bots over rule-based ones. We were delighted to see a talk by transportation company flix on how and why they moved from their rule-based bot onwards to an agentic one. In a nutshell, what they've done is measure their costumer satisfaction and frustration with their bots, both had advantages and problems (they showed examples), and the agentic one had a superior satisfaction rate, so that's how they made their decision. 

Flix presentation gave very good insight into how their customers interact with their bots. Their slide design we weren't fans of though. 

Besides the presentations the event also included panel discussions with representatives from some major companies using conversational AI. A use case we hadn't considered yet and that we felt was very interesting was talked about by Schwarz Group (Lidl) that we want to call "real time talk with your database". The example they gave was grocery store employees who encountered every day situations like customers asking for where to find articles, machines having to be maintained or situations having to be made aware to managers. In their example the employees could talk to an AI bot that is connected to the relevant databases and APIs so it can look up stock, check machines and forward messages. 

There was a casino night hosted by Cognigy as an evening event.

Other mention worthy talks were by Allianz insurance, whose very enthusiastic speaker made a point that we personally believed for some time now, the choice of language model is not that important, what's important is the application you build on top of it. 

AWS explaining RAG like it's 2023.

Not everyone appears to agree though, as AWS gave a presentation talking about their own new language model and how they are able to host different open source language models. To us their talk felt like it was at least one year too late. 

Talk by Cognigy about how to build intelligent agents on their platform and how they are different from rule-base conversation bots. 

One of the giveaways at the event were unicorn plush toys. Whether Cognigy plans to become a unicorn or go public instead is something they didn't tell us. (We asked)