Unlock AI’s full potential with custom digital assistants

Chatbots have been around for quite some time, but the initial ones were rather basic, essentially mirroring the typical script of a customer service representative. These chatbots attempt to derive user intentions based on rudimentary methods such as keyword matching, which often leads to misinterpretations. On top, the moment a user deviated from a script, the chatbot became ineffectual. Moreover, any changes to the company’s products, services, or internal processes required a reconfiguration of the chatbot’s scripts. 

This all changed with the emergence of large language models (LLMs). When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, their AI chatbot gained 100 million users in just two months. To put this in perspective: it took Facebook 4.5 years to hit similar numbers. The potential of chatbots has also been recognized by businesses, as is evident from numbers shown at Gartner’s IT Symposium 2023. 80% of CIOs and technology executives plan full generative AI adoption within three years, and 74% intend to increase their AI investments in 2024. Generative AI was also named as one of the top technologies for innovation by 51% of the CIOs and technology leaders. 

These LLM-based chatbots provide an approachable way of accessing a knowledge base, allowing users to express their questions in natural language. Employees in various businesses leverage AI chatbots to speed up their research, summarize large documents, and answer questions about internal company data. They are also used to answer simple questions from customers, enabling customer service representatives to focus on the more intricate issues. 

From chatbot to digital assistant 

However, it takes more than a chatbot to become a truly useful digital assistant. The typical question/answer dialogue of a chatbot, while useful in many scenarios, only taps into a fraction of the available potential.  

A digital assistant doesn't simply converse, it also interacts with you and your entire team as a virtual team member, fully integrated into your business processes. This means that it can read your team's emails, search through documents on your SharePoint drive, respond to calls, schedule meetings in your private or shared calendars, and even perform tasks using your company’s custom business applications. 

This approach has proven useful in multiple scenarios. Imagine an HR assistant that can answer questions about an employee’s contract and schedule a meeting with the appropriate person for further discussion. Or a regulatory assistant that can offer guidance on processes and procedures, directing the employee to original source texts. 

The business case for these digital assistants is increased employee or customer satisfaction. Integrating them into your company’s business processes and making them available around the clock can significantly improve your operational efficiency. 

Accelerating digital assistant development 

Every AI project should start with a pilot project. This allows your business experts to experiment and evaluate whether the digital assistant’s output meets your expectations. However, the gap between a successful pilot and a production-ready solution is often still considerable and you need to experiment to reach an optimal performance. 

Based on our expertise in AI, Cegeka has created an accelerator for developing digital assistants and bridging this gap. This means that, once you have identified a use case for a digital assistant, we can offer you all the necessary building blocks. After a successful PoC for your use case, you can quickly deploy your custom digital assistant to become fully operational. 

Compared to a general out-of-the box solution such as Microsoft Copilot, our custom digital assistants offer the following advantages: 

• Customizable:  Our digital assistant can plug in various data sources and business applications. 

• Fast implementation: Thanks to Cegeka's expertise and off-the-shelf solutions, we can ensure short implementation times for your Digital Assistant. Therefore, you have a quick return on the project for building your digital assistant. 

• Future-proof: Digital assistants can be tailored today or tomorrow with changing requirements and changing technology to find the best cost-quality balance for your specific use case. Your digital assistant will always be the right one for you. 

• Production-ready: Thanks to our teams leveraging production-grade technology, your IT team can keep the digital assistant up and running with high availability and high performance – perfectly fitting in any use case you can imagine. 

• Flexible in deployment: You can deploy your digital assistant in the cloud with an API-based large language model, or self-host it with an open-source large language model. 

In a future blog article, we’ll delve deeper into the differences between our solution and Microsoft Copilot. 

Lessons learned 

After having used our accelerator to implement digital assistants for various customers, we have learned some crucial lessons: 

• Establish a business case: Given how quickly AI implementations can evolve into highly complex systems, clearly outlining your use case and the value a digital assistant could generate is crucial. This enables you to strike an optimal balance between value and complexity.
  
  
• Ensure close integration: Integrate your digital assistant firmly into your existing business processes. Ensure that users can access it through the same application they already use for their tasks, whether it’s SharePoint, WhatsApp, or a website.