Companies can put the new crop of intelligent assistants to work quickly, and with surprising ease. There’s usually no need to change your existing applications. It’s a layer over what you have—or might have in the future.

The only challenging part is diagramming all of the different ways you’d like the conversation to flow. Fortunately, embedded analytics will tell you if you’ve done a good job or where you might need to improve. Thanks to machine learning, the intelligent assistant can also improve on its own over time, usually by making better recommendations.