Our customer, a digital media and broadcasting company, produces a range of content. Their reliance on an ever-changing roster of freelance journalists meant IT staff were constantly bombarded by high-volume, non-technical request tickets that didn’t necessarily require human interaction. Data was also siloed across several different repositories, including a Freshservice IT service management (ITSM) knowledge base, Google Drive, and other external knowledge bases—making a self-serve option without intelligent automation and conversational AI a non-starter.

The customer needed to optimize its internal IT ticket processes through the automation of routine employee and contractor requests for support to improve efficiency and amplify existing skill sets within the IT team. Because the company relies on contractors and freelance journalists often deployed in the field with few in-person resources at hand, these requests were extremely common. Answering each of these queries through a human IT staffer was relatively slow, inefficient, and costly.

Pythian worked with the customer’s IT director to develop a proof-of-concept (PoC) that demonstrated the effectiveness of intelligent virtual agents (a.k.a. chatbots and voicebots) to automate various requests for IT support in Google Chat or via email.

The virtual agents utilize a custom document vectorizer, which encodes unstructured data such as text and images, in Google Cloud Functions acting as a single source of truth from a series of internal and external data repositories. Cloud Functions allow users to run serverless and containerless code in the cloud.

Read the full customer story to learn about the results and key outcomes.