Each quarter, I share a collection of customer and partner stories from around the world that highlight the incredible technological advancements shaping the future of industry. As a partner of choice, we are committed to helping organizations accelerate AI Transformation to unlock opportunities and realize material business value. Our ability to bend the curve on AI innovation is allowing us to live truer to our mission than ever before: to empower our customers and partners to achieve more.
I am sharing an additional blog this quarter because we are seeing so much inspiring AI Transformation and pragmatic innovation with our customers. Their impressive results are benefiting employees, businesses, and industry, and I would like to expand on a handful of stories that crystallize the tangible impact AI is having on organizations that embrace it:
Digital financial services firm Ally Financial is leveraging Microsoft Azure and Azure OpenAI Service to reduce manual tasks for its customer service associates, freeing up time for them to reinvent how they engage with customers. Previously, associates needed to take notes and write summaries after every call, which competed with the amount of time and attention they could give to their customers. By using generative AI to automate manual tasks, Ally empowered its associates to deliver a better, more personal experience while protecting vital customer data through a production-ready solution in only eight weeks. The new solution has cut associates’ post-call effort by 30% while capturing critical information automatically with over 85% accuracy — even finding details they may have previously missed in their conversations.
Global travel technology provider Amadeus deployed Copilot for Microsoft 365 to help empower its workforce, beginning with early adoption across a subset of employees. More than 90% of these employees are regularly using Copilot to save time drafting emails, summarize meetings and actions, and more effectively search for information across the web and internal assets. Now, the company is rolling out the solution across its wider workforce so employees around the world can benefit from its time-saving options to focus on more strategic tasks.
Global life sciences leader Bayer is using Copilot for Microsoft 365 to deliver productivity and collaboration benefits across its Crop Science, Pharmaceutical and Consumer Health divisions. With more than 700 use cases identified, they are already seeing a big impact from its implementation. Copilot is helping to summarize communications and expedite the search for information, saving employees hundreds of hours. Bayer also developed the Model Store — a Copilot plugin leveraging the Microsoft Teams platform — to search for information using natural language to close communication gaps between data scientists and laboratory researchers, locate the source of data faster, reduce barriers to finding information and help collaborate with the expert source. For example, Copilot helped a U.S. researcher identify a predictive model already developed by a researcher in Germany, preventing a duplicate model from being developed and saving two to three months of work.
Multinational brewer Carlsberg unified its developer organization around an integrated platform using GitHub Enterprise — reducing their toolchain from six tools to a single platform. This allowed for the seamless and effective integration of GitHub Copilot, which enhanced the synergy in their workflow and removed development roadblocks by providing valuable coding suggestions. Copilot adoption has been overwhelmingly positive, enhancing productivity across teams and proving to be a valuable learning tool for cloud developers by easing the learning curve required when working with new languages and platforms.
One of the top media companies in the world, Dentsu, is using Copilot for Microsoft 365 to revolutionize workflows, support its talent and help rethink its services across a growing number of channels. By reducing and removing tactical tasks, employees can focus on the strategic part of their work to collaborate creatively. Employees are saving 30-40 minutes a day using Copilot for tasks such as summarizing chats, generating presentations and building executive summaries. They are reinvesting their time to focus on more thoughtful work without interruption, while having content served up within their workflows. Employees are now averaging 30-60 minutes less time on first drafts of messaging and 80% say they have a very positive view of Copilot.
Food industry giant Grupo Bimbo turned to Microsoft’s Azure AI technologies — including Azure OpenAI Service, Form Recognizer and Cognitive Search — to develop a copilot solution in two weeks that helped employees make queries about company policies. The copilot for internal control and risk management employs advanced AI technology to seamlessly convey information in a synthesized format, complemented by readily accessible reference links that pinpoint the exact sources of global policy. It can also respond in all languages where the company has collaborators and operations, no matter what language the query is originally made in. The primary benefit for the company has been its ability to promote compliance across 34 countries. Now, they are replicating the technology to build a copilot product that empowers all individuals and departments. For example, the copilot is helping their communications team draft emails, craft content for social media, propose images for marketing products, translate text and more.
U.S. healthcare organization Providence faced a deluge of incoming messages that required triage and interfered with the time providers needed to spend with their patients. Providence clinicians, informaticists and AI specialists developed a tool based on Azure OpenAI Service named ProvARIA to classify messages, direct them to the appropriate caregiver and free providers to focus on patient care. Providence piloted the tool with four separate clinics representing 27 different doctors and nurse practitioners, funneling all electronic communications into a centralized inbox in a single office. A group of medical assistants worked together to address the messages, processing about 10,000 messages in one month with a 35% improvement in turnaround time. Other groups within Providence enthusiastically joined the pilot, introducing efficiencies that allowed clinics to manage messages with fewer medical assistants — a boon when the limited number of qualified medical assistants is in high demand. Providence medical assistants are now processing 5,000 messages per day, covering 145 Providence clinics and 650 providers. The most profound outcome is one that cannot be measured, and one that had not been anticipated: caregivers have gained peace of mind knowing they have the time and focus to help all patients who need it.
One of the largest digital telco companies in Asia, Telkomsel, needed a way to ensure its customer support team was not overwhelmed by sharply rising demand. The company upgraded a virtual assistant within two weeks with Azure OpenAI Service to improve interactions across its 159 million mobile subscriber base and 8.5 million fixed broadband customers. The virtual agent is helping customer support agents deal with more complex issues without the distraction of routine inquiries and is reducing burnout from facing long call queues. By infusing light-hearted humor and emoticons into the conversation, the new virtual assistant “Veronika” intelligently combines the latest information from multiple FAQs to supply more insightful answers with a personal touch. Telkomsel has scaled the solution to handle up to 5 million transactions per month while delivering the robust security it requires. Since its introduction, self-service interactions have risen from 19% to 45%, with a 140% increase in average messages per user. Customer service agents who used to handle 8,000 calls a day now handle 1,000, freeing up time to increase their cross-selling efforts.
Leading telecommunications and technology company Telstra has scaled its AI adoption following promising pilots of generative AI solutions with front-line team members. Leveraging the Microsoft Cloud and Azure OpenAI Service capabilities, two pilot programs were developed: One Sentence Summary and Ask Telstra. Using Azure OpenAI Service’s large language models, One Sentence Summary transforms customer notes, interactions and transactions into a concise summary of a customer’s recent history and status. The solution enhances the efficiency and quality of interactions, reducing the need for customers to repeat information. Ninety percent of employees using the tool saved time and increased effectiveness, resulting in 20% less follow-up contact. Ask Telstra enables employees to search the company’s extensive internal knowledge base quickly and easily for information, powered by Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Search. Employees were able to gather information faster and more easily for customers, with over 80% agreeing the technology had a positive impact on customer interactions. Now the company is rolling out the pilots across all contact centers and store teams throughout 2024.
To pursue its digital transformation efforts, global multi-energy company TotalEnergies launched Microsoft Copilot to provide employees with a secure AI chat solution based on internal data. After a successful test phase across 300 employees, the company also launched Copilot for Microsoft 365 for their employees, resulting in improved operational efficiency and user adoption. The company is also focused on a new program to support and enhance employee skilling to get the most out of these new AI tools, including implementation of low code-no code solutions with Microsoft Power Platform.
To alleviate an overwhelming workload for doctors and medical staff in major cities across Vietnam, VinBrain introduced an AI platform into hospital workflows: DrAid
. Operating on an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) data system, DrAid harnesses Microsoft technologies —including Azure OpenAI Service —to aid physicians in diagnostic processes, treatment planning and the efficient management of burgeoning medical records. This platform is the first and only AI-driven X-ray diagnostic tool in Southeast Asia to receive U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) certification, propelling Vietnam into the top six nations globally with FDA-approved AI products for chest X-ray diagnostics. Comprehensive screening is achieving an accuracy rate of up to 95%, and advanced imaging capabilities allow for the detection of liver cancer tumors as small as 5mm to help facilitate early-stage intervention and curative treatment. The tool is also reducing initial screening times by 80-85% and lowering time to analyze cases from 30 minutes to 5 minutes per case.
Leading manufacturer Volvo Group needed the ability to extract data from images — such as photographs, stamps and printed text with handwritten notes over it — and translate documents to and from multiple languages to help its workers streamline invoices and claims document processing. Built on Microsoft Azure, Volvo created a six-week pilot program with a solution using Microsoft Azure AI services and AI Document Intelligence. After a four-month production timeline, they launched a solution that simplified document processing and meets the objectives of data extraction that has saved employees more than 10,000 manual hours — about 850-plus manual hours per month. Now, employees are enjoying their work more, with additional time to focus on innovation and tasks related to their specific skill sets.
To scale digital platforms to more than 300 million businesses, public sector organizations and consumers across Europe and Africa, Vodafone is leveraging Microsoft’s generative AI to provide highly personalized and differentiated customer experiences across multiple channels. Their investment is already reinventing how Vodafone engages with customers and accelerating digital transformation. Early testing shows that AI-powered assistants are reducing average handling times and providing AI-generated responses with greater accuracy. Thanks to faster and more accurate responses, the company is also improving customer satisfaction scores.
I hope you find these stories of AI Transformation as promising and inspiring as I do. I invite you to read my January pre-earnings blog to learn more about how customers and partners are unlocking AI opportunity across industries: Embracing AI Transformation: How customers and partners are driving pragmatic innovation to achieve business outcomes with the Microsoft Cloud. I remain grateful for the opportunity we have at Microsoft to help our customers and partners realize pragmatic business value with AI, and look forward to finding ways we can help your organization achieve more.
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Source: The Official Microsoft Blog