ABN AMRO skips past traditional Conversational AI vendors and adopts Microsoft Copilot Studio
This is somewhat alarming news if you're representing a traditional Conversational AI vendor. I actually found out about it thanks to reader Michael posting the news in the Conversational AI News Whatsapp channel. Thanks Michael!
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After a 'competitive RFP process', ABN AMRO bank, one of the big European players, has selected Microsoft to power their customer-facing "Anna" Conversational AI agent (and also "Abby", their internal employee support agent).
This is super news for Microsoft and a big, big tick for the company's ongoing agenda to place Copilot at the centre of its AI strategy.
How are things going? Well, the press release has good news:
The new agents are consistently deliver[ing] high customer satisfaction. The accuracy rate for intent recognition was increased by 7% for Dutch, leading to more precise and reliable interactions. With Microsoft Copilot Studio, ABN AMRO also sees faster time to market for improvements to its new agents.
The release notes that Anna supports 2M+ text conversations and 1.5M+ voice conversations a year at the moment, although I'd expect that to only increase as time goes on.
Here's a bit of gossip on how they actually did it:
The migration to Copilot Studio was completed in just 6 months – driven by a successful partnership with Microsoft and Capgemini. “We helped anchor the partnership with our team and the ABN AMRO team, laying the groundwork for a successful implementation,” says Mark Oost, Vice President AI & Generative AI, Insights & Data at CapGemini.
Nice work CapGemini, ABN & Microsoft.
Now then: Is this the right move for everyone?
That's an interesting question. You see, from my reckoning with the Conversational AI Maturity Framework I've developed, I'm not entirely sure that Microsoft's Copilot fits the bill, fully, especially when taking into account the extensive demands of some of the integrations I've seen across the wider ecosystem. I'll need to go and research it in more depth. If you hook Copilot into everything that Microsoft already offers (think Azure services, PowerBi, data lakes and so on) together with some custom programming from some Capgemini geniuses, then yeah, it's eminently possible. Does it or can it rival some of the best third party Conversational AI vendors out there today? I wonder.
As I indicated above though, this is concerning news for traditional Conversational AI vendors. If you can switch to Microsoft rather effortlessly, it's using an 'external vendor' is going to be a big ask.
I say 'external' because, when it comes to almost any large company, Microsoft is already an 'internal vendor' – that is, they're already approved. They're already in use. 9 times out of 10, the company's already operating with a Microsoft 365 tenancy, for example. In some cases, there might not even need to be an additional service contract to deploy Copilot to manage your end customer Conversational AI capabilities.
The discussion in the Conversational AI WhatsApp channel was pretty incisive with many commenting that Copilot is not necessarily the right technology for a lot of complicated conversation flows... yet.
Yet is the operative word.
Here's one comment from one reader on Copilot for such Chatbot use cases:
"It's great for sign-posting and FAQs... but not possible to orchestrate complex dialogues with context of integrated data and processes to actually execute an action."
I think it's fair to suggest that the consensus on the reader WhatsApp channel was that many enterprises are likely to favour Microsoft-led technology, so Copilot certainly has legs. It's also likely that the Copilot technology will continue to develop deeper capabilities in due course.
We shall see.
- Read the full release from Microsoft here.
- Read more about Microsoft's Copilot Studio.
In the meantime, if you'd like to join us in the Reader WhatsApp channel to debate this an a whole host of related topics, you can join with this invite link.
