Business Situation
Siemens AG is a global technology powerhouse that brings together the digital and physical worlds to benefit customers and society. It creates technology with purpose to transform the everyday for billions of people – starting with its own employees.
Committed to improving the digital workplace experience, Siemens AG built a system for its corporate finance team that automatically consolidates and validates data from across the company. But even with the best designed systems, access errors happen. With a chatbot as the first entry point for users, Siemens AG wanted to ease the time and costs associated with support resolutions.
“We wanted both text and image recognition. It was not easy to find a technology provider that could do both. We tried out several image recognition tools, but only Microsoft’s image recognition capabilities worked for us.”
Solution
Siemens AG engaged Avanade to help build and deploy “Holmes,” a no-code chatbot. Using Microsoft Cognitive Services and our CuriousBot accelerator, we elevated the bot’s capabilities beyond just conversational language to include image recognition.
Microsoft’s Language Understanding (LUIS) is built into the bot to provide a high quality, nuanced language model. This Microsoft Azure conversational AI service applies custom machine learning intelligence to identify valuable information in natural language conversations and interpret user intent. To render the right solutions, Holmes connects to Siemens AG's Wiki knowledge pool, where it can surface information and then quickly and easily render solutions to the user.
Results
Holmes’ natural cognitive understanding meets users where they are. It considers their behaviors and expectations in improving the overall workplace experience. As a result, Siemens AG realised:
- Improved employee satisfaction: A modern workplace that evolves to meet the needs of employees can help attract and retain top talent.
- Increased productivity: Holmes aims to solve 30% of user login requests, reducing the workload on IT employees and getting users back online faster.
- Cost savings for innovation: The speed and ease offered by the solution have led to lower IT costs. These savings can be reinvested in internal and external innovations.
Siemens' Holmes chatbot for central financial closing application aims to solve 30% of user inquiries
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