Speed and efficiency are arguably two of the main ingredients for business success. Over the years, technology has played an increasingly important role in helping businesses make the most of these to scale and evolve. More recently, new AI solutions are being used to enhance and speed up processes, making business operations much more seamless and eliminating menial tasks. In this blog, we will touch on some use cases of how AI can turn simple but time-consuming tasks into efficient workflows.

Challenge #1: Improve knowledge sharing when onboarding new hires

When new starters join a company, often the first few weeks are information overload, even with the most meticulous onboarding approach. There are always so many different documents to read and processes to absorb, and, usually, this information is stored in multiple locations, whether on a company intranet or in a Shared Drive on the system. Struggling to remember where documents are saved or worrying about bothering colleagues with basic questions is not a long-term solution. Improving knowledge share and allowing new starters to understand processes quicker and easier using AI is how businesses today are getting ahead. 

Challenge #2: Answering customer queries and keeping them engaged

Most businesses will have an FAQ page on their website and, as standard, will direct customers to that page if they have simple queries. What if the answer is hard to find? What if their question does not appear on the page? Scouring the website to see what they are looking for is time consuming, often pushing customers away. Of course, they can always contact Customer Services, but again, this can be a terribly frustrating process if they are waiting hours for a response to a simple question. This also pulls away Customer Service Agents from dealing with more complex queries that require human intervention. Bridging the communication gap and improving the time it takes for a customer to find what they are looking for is vital for organisations to improve and stand out from their competitors.

Solution: Conversations with a chatbot 

The above challenges address both internal and external pain points. However, creating a chatbot that can answer questions automatically will address these, making it much easier to share knowledge and information. 

Historically, creating a chatbot required heavy time and financial investments as different tools were required for programming languages, NLP libraries, chatbot frameworks, cloud services for hosting, UI design tools, APIs for integration, version control systems, and possibly TTS/STT services for voice interaction - the list goes on.

How does it work?

Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search & Conversation greatly simplifies the process of creating a chatbot. It provides a single platform that helps companies get started quickly, where users can utilise the out-of-the-box capabilities to build and deploy chatbots and search engines in hours.

Google’s foundation models enable these applications to support multi-modal interactions that use not only text but also other forms of data, such as images and voice. They can have multi-turn conversations, which means that users can ask follow-up questions without having to start from scratch. Additionally, these applications can offer content summarisation, citations, and recommendations to aid knowledge discovery and build confidence in the information shared.

As seen in the diagram below, Vertex AI’s Datastore can connect to multiple data sources and start to index the data automatically.

When an end-user asks the agent a question, the agent searches for an answer from the given source content and summarises the findings into a coherent agent response. It also provides supporting links to the sources of the response for the end-user to learn more. For example, if an end-user asks the agent: 'What are the company's benefits?', the agent will search for the benefits on the company's website, organisational documents, and FAQ page on the website. If the agent is able to find the information needed, it will summarise the statements, and the user can ask follow-up questions - meaning they can ask questions in their own time but get answers almost instantly.

If you want to learn more about how chatbots can aid your business, contact us today!