NatWest launches "Ask Archie" internal Conversational AI tool
NatWest has announced they've launched "Ask Archie", their internal Conversational AI virtual assistant to manage employee queries.
In a lot of my research on Conversational AI, I've seen many examples where internal Virtual Assistants are delivering fantastic results, especially in the context of 'agent assist' (helping agents rapidly answer queries whilst they're on the phone with customers).
It's great to see NatWest continuing to experiment with Archie. This sounds like it is a generalised tool to offer support for 'workplace queries', rather than targeted at a specific use case, e.g. call centres.
Here's how the announcement explains things:
Ask Archie’s Gen AI capabilities create better, more natural conversations and share more targeted information and links to specific documents and policies. This enables colleagues to get access to information more easily via Archie, meaning our human agents can spend more time working on more complex support cases.
Most senior executives are far more relaxed when it comes to Generative AI and internal use cases – and I think this is a simple, easy and effective use case in the context of essentially offering a quicker more convenient way of querying existing policy documents.
I remember at previous banks having to constantly go hunting to the end of the intranet to try and find policy wording to check I was doing my expenses correctly. Some of the systems were so annoying - or were links to Word Documents on Sharepoint - so easily adding them to bookmarks was quite annoying.
So good work NatWest.
Here's a quote from the bank's Head of Data Science & Innovation, Graham Smith:
Graham Smith, our Head of Data Science & Innovation described the launch of Ask Archie Gen AI as “groundbreaking work that gives colleagues conversational access to our knowledge bases for the first time.” He continued “The technology and design patterns we have used set the standard for many similar use cases we’re working on across the bank and teams are already exploring how to reuse the capability."
You can find Graham on LinkedIn here:
(Thanks to NatWest's Michael England for posting about this and alerting me to the announcement with his post!)
