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AskTECHNO uses generative search to transform proposal management
IBM Consulting, IBM Software and the IBM Chief Information Officer organization
Exhaustive content searching prolongs the time to gather proposal details
Client proposals play a crucial role in securing business deals. Due to the increasing demand for customized solutions, delivering proposals that are both accurate and timely is vital for success in today's market.
IBM client proposals include sales, delivery and technical related information about software, hardware and services. The extensive IBM products portfolio may require IBM employees to spend more time than intended to search and find the desired proposal contents. Information can be gathered from a multitude of sources, such as sales related documents, proposal templates and artifacts, product offerings, and product guides.
Generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) can help improve efficiency and insights while creating proposals and delivering products for IBM clients. IBM Consulting®, IBM Software and the IBM Chief Information Officer (CIO) organization used generative search to build a contents digital assistant, now known as AskTECHNO, to automate contents search for IBM products.
Transforming proposal management with an AI-powered platform
The digital assistant was built with IBM® watsonx.ai™, IBM Granite™-class large language models (LLMs)1, IBM Watson® Discovery and IBM Cloud® Code Engine augmented with strategic internal IBM content, mainly sales related documents.
IBM Consulting, IBM Software and the IBM CIO organization leveraged IBM technology and tools to transform proposal management and contributed to enterprise-level product optimization by providing feedback to the product teams. For example, watsonx.ai helped generate answers to users’ questions while IBM Granite translated users’ queries and searched contents between English and Japanese. To search IBM external websites, the team used IBM Watson Discovery with the IBM Cloud Code Engine receiving and saving users’ activity log into a database application.
The digital assistant was designed to enable users to identify and connect with subject matter experts, expedite contents search and automate finding IBM products information, such as product support, product guides and product teams. It uses generative search which combines elements of traditional web search with machine learning techniques to deliver applicable responses to IBM employees based on queries.
When using AskTECHNO, IBM employees can ask questions in Japanese and English to obtain a response. The Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technique enables the digital assistant to use the ingested contents to create responses that incorporate the most relevant information found. The responses offered by AskTECHNO include the information sources and when was the information published or last updated.
IBM Japan launched the initial AskTECHNO release in April 2024. Going forward, the plan is to continue to enhance AskTECHNO to reduce searching workload, improve the quality of the responses, ingest additional English contents, broaden the search coverage and promote AskTECHNO to grow global adoption. The intention is for all IBM employees to use the application, especially newcomers requiring assistance searching and finding desired proposal contents.
1watsonx.ai includes IBM-built foundation models referred to as IBM Granite. These multi-size foundation models apply generative AI to both language and code.
The experience designing, developing and deploying AskTECHNO has yielded valuable lessons IBM Consulting, IBM Software and the IBM CIO organization can share with IBM clients worldwide. These include:
- Cross-unit collaboration and communication were decisive. Various teams contributed to the search coverage requirements definition process to gather the AskTECHNO contents.
- Education on how to effectively use AskTECHNO was also key. The responses offered are as good as the prompts given, reason for educating IBM employees to use natural language queries to obtain better answers.
- The AskTECHNO product team needs to continue working with the information sources administrators to make contents searchable by AskTECHNO.
The Chief Information Officer (CIO) organization leads IBM’s internal IT strategy and is responsible for delivering, securing, modernizing and supporting the IT solutions that IBM employees, clients and partners use to do their jobs every day. The CIO organization’s strategy encompasses creating an adaptive IT platform that makes IT tools, applications and systems easier to access across the enterprise, accelerates problem-solving and serves as an innovation engine for IBM, catalyzing business growth.
IBM Consulting® accelerates business transformation for their clients through hybrid cloud and AI technologies, leveraging IBM open ecosystem of partners. With deep industry and business expertise spanning strategy, experience design, technology and operations, IBM Consulting has become the trusted partner to the world’s most innovative and valuable companies, helping modernize and secure their most complex systems. Their 160,000 consultants embrace an open way of working and apply their proven co-creation method, IBM Garage™, to scale ideas into outcomes.
IBM Software systems and applications are designed to solve the most challenging needs of organizations large and small, across all industries, worldwide. The hybrid cloud software offerings are uniquely designed to help clients modernize, predict, automate and secure their business by unlocking the intelligence of AI and the agility of hybrid cloud.
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Client examples are presented as illustrations of how those clients have used IBM products and the results they may have achieved. Actual performance, cost, savings or other results in other operating environments may vary.
