Launching AI-Enabled Solutions To Drive Efficiency

Technology and Digital Case Study

North Highland developed and launched an AI-enabled ecosystem of tools that helps employees do their jobs better and faster while enabling them to elevate the skills that make humans essential: creativity, innovation, and decision-making.

Client Situation

Our client, a top 10 global technology enterprise, sought ways to improve customer experience and sales processes for licensed products and cloud services. Sales and licensing associates were spending too much time on manual information-finding tasks. Information that they needed changed regularly, and tracking down the latest was sapping productivity, slowing the sales cycle, and distracting from higher value activities. With a globally distributed and rapidly growing sales force of over 15,000 employees—speaking different languages in different countries—the solution had to be both simple and scalable.

Our Approach

We partnered with our client over 14 weeks to create a virtual assistant bot that is capable of answering complex product questions with a user interface that facilitates quick access to precise answers.

Key Build Activities: Bot definition, design, and development required multiple interconnected workstreams. The project team started with a discovery phase to map functionality goals to user needs, followed by requirements definition, back-end conceptual and technical architecture, data source identification and mapping, and ontology development. The front-end design was experience-led, and our design and UX team delivered brand-aligned interface designs and bot dialogue for multiple channels. Also, our team supported an internal security review; led testing, integration and bug fix; and helped our client develop channel-level analytics capabilities. Throughout, North Highland paid special attention to behavior change and user engagement to ensure the technology not only worked but was adopted and evangelized internally.

Enabling Factors: Following the beta launch, North Highland developed and delivered immersive training for the internal team to become “bot trainers” to maintain the solutions, supported by a visual step-by-step bot owner’s manual and virtual training environment. The new bot ecosystem created a human-hybrid workforce that needed to be fostered in order to sustain. We worked with our client to map future processes, develop a scaled training architecture, and create a marketing funnel, ensuring dynamic knowledge transfer from various content owners into the virtual assistants.

Value Delivered

North Highland developed and implemented a custom AI-enabled cognitive solution that handles manual, repeatable information- finding tasks, freeing up sales specialists to focus time and judgment structuring complex deals and growing customer relationships. By creating a human-machine partnership that leverages bots for routine tasks, it is estimated that our client will be able to redirect 276,000 hours per year—the equivalent of 32 full-time employees—towards higher value tasks that are more fulfilling and rewarding to their employees. Introducing AI-enabled tools into the workforce will help employees do their jobs better and faster, all while improving service to the end customer.

Our goal is to use AI to amplify human intelligence. We use the machines to do repeatable things that machines are good at, like providing answers to frequent questions and turning data into usable, easily accessible information. This will help employees improve their ability to help customers. - Client partner

Learn more about North Highland's suite of Cognitive Services here.