An Interview with Mauricio Lázaro, inConcert’s new AI Applications Manager

Originally from Uruguay and based in Spain, our new AI Applications Manager is a Systems Engineer with an MBA from the Montevideo University Business School (IEEM). He brings his extensive background in the infrastructure industry to inConcert: he was the Operations Manager for the Uruguayan company ITS (Infrastructure Technology Services) and later the founder and CEO of Miodesk in Spain, a company that provides infrastructure management, server maintenance, and security and public cloud solutions.

In this new stage at inConcert, Mauricio brings his immense technical knowledge and team-leading skills to foster a great working environment during this new stage at inConcert. Outside the office, he enjoys playing soccer and cycling in the Catalonia mountains. In this interview, he told us more about his goals in the new role and gave us a sneak peek of some important inConcert news for this year.

This new area focuses on converting the current product portfolio of the inConcert suite into specialized portfolios across different industry verticals, with a particular focus on developing automation and artificial intelligence solutions for each one.

The aim is to provide technological solutions to each type of industry with the specialization they require. This is done not only at the R&D development level, but from a strategic and commercial approach, with specialized salespeople and consultants.

Conversational commerce is the big star of this verticalization process, as it represents the official arrival of inConcert's technology and our virtual assistants to the e-commerce and retail ecosystem.

We are also working on finance and collections by designing special chat or voice bots to collect late payments during the early stages. Another important vertical is the education sector, where we integrate bots into university management systems to automatically resolve queries about courses and even manage payments or new enrollments.

Verticalization involves working along two lines for each case. The first line of work is to train the bot in the language of the vertical in question, sometimes even by region. The second line of work is integrating the bot with the vertical’s systems. For a retailer, for example, this typically involves integrating the bot with inventory systems and configuring all of the retailer’s products. inConcert offers native integrations with the most popular systems in the market, but we also develop manual integrations if the customer uses a proprietary system.

Bot development also involves planning for omnichannel integration with agent support. If human intervention is required to handle complex interactions, the transfer is transparent: the agent has access to all the user’s information and does not have to repeat questions.

We are currently working on verticalization based on company size, and we can announce that inConcert has a platform coming soon that has been specifically designed for SMEs and the middle-size segment. It involves an interaction manager with a simple chatbot, which works as a mass self-provisioned SaaS.

The client inserts their card, and they can start working with the software. It will be a product with an excellent look and feel, but one that simplifies the user experience. It ideal, for example, for a dealership with less than ten agents, which does not need all the features that the contact center software has. With this new solution, you can have one subscription per agent, and attend , to WhatsApp and social networks on the same platform, with a chatbot as the first point of contact to answer frequently asked questions.

I enjoy team building and fostering a good atmosphere. We currently have several groups with my former ITS colleagues, and we talk all the time. It is not easy to generate such good relationships, but always encourage it from my position. It’s important to me that my team likes the tasks, and that there is intrinsic motivation. I make it a point to get to know everyone I work with and assign tasks that are compatible with their likes and dislikes.