You-Get / Polpo

Business challenge

To create a smart monitoring service for the public sector, You-Get needed an AI solution that could filter search results accurately based on relevance.

Transformation

You-Get helped launch Polpo, a smart, real-time monitoring service with Watson™ Explorer to analyze search results, determine the appropriate context and eliminate previously manual work.  

Results

Business challenge story

An opportunity in the public affairs sector

After spending years creating business process management (BPM) solutions for enterprise customers, You-Get’s Director of AI & RPA, Desmin Dekker, saw an opportunity to create a solution for the public sector, including enterprise organizations with public affairs departments, or public affairs professionals working at non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or individuals doing public affairs work.

Dekker had a meeting with Caspar Pille, a former college classmate, who described the challenges of manually searching for relevant public information. “Caspar told me that he had to read information from the same sources every day to make sure he did not miss anything important. There were some keyword-based monitoring tools available, but these gave a great many number of results that were not relevant,” says Dekker. Plus, to get good results from these tools, users had to build extensive queries.

Finding relevant information has only become more difficult as the number of sources that publish political information increases. Monitoring all of these sources is time-consuming and repetitive. “We realized there was a need for public affairs professionals and lobbyists to have a tool that not only delivers information, but also filters it based on relevance in order to be able to get snap decisions when new information surfaces,” says Dekker. To create a solution that would address these challenges, Dekker needed an AI application.

Transformation story

Context recognition provides differentiation

Dekker teamed with Pille to help launch Polpo, a new company that provides the Polpo smart political monitoring SaaS solution. The Polpo service gathers information from a variety of government sources and then applies the analytical capabilities of the Watson Explorer service. “We call Watson the smart and cognitive core of our application,” says Dekker. The Polpo solution saves all of the analyzed data in a database and then users can query that database or opt to receive email alerts.

According to Johan van Zaanen, the Customer Success Lead at Polpo, what distinguishes the Polpo service from other similar tools is that it gives the user a greater degree of control over context. For example, if a user is searching on the keyword “blockchain,” he or she will get different results depending on the chosen context. If the context is economic affairs, the results may be about how the technology is transforming the banking industry. If the context is the justice department, the results may be about cybercrime, security and privacy. “We reinvented the way people search for political information by harnessing the power of the Watson Explorer service’s context recognition capability,” says Dekker. The Polpo solution can also provide trend analysis, so users can determine if interest in their subject is increasing or decreasing.

Results story

A smart monitor replaces manual searches

The Polpo solution gives users access to all of the public affairs information they need in a single dashboard or email. More importantly, that information is all highly relevant to the search terms provided, because the Watson Explorer service has filtered out unrelated information. “Our customers tell us that the solution saves them time, at least one hour a day in information gathering, and it also brings them peace of mind because they know they will not miss any important information if they are not actively looking,” says Dekker. 

By developing the Polpo SaaS offering, Polpo is making Watson technology available at a competitive price. “Normally Watson Explorer is an enterprise-grade product, but we created a solution that packages it as a SaaS offering, which makes it affordable for smaller organizations and departments within larger organizations,” says Dekker.

You-Get

Founded in 2007, You-Get is a family-owned business based in Amsterdam. Focused on business process consulting, the company has more than 70 employees in the Netherlands and Vietnam.

Solution component

• Watson Discovery

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