Black & Veatch, an employee-owned, global leader in
building critical human infrastructure in energy, water, telecommunications, and
government services are on a journey to leverage AI-assisted bots, called virtual
experts, to better capture and interact with engineering knowledge and
standards. The goal of this emerging effort is to experiment with ways to
better capture knowledge and expertise within the company. Ultimately, the initiative would lead to a reduced amount of time required to locate the desired
information and create an opportunity for continued innovation to better
support the future. Knowledge Management is a difficult problem and has had challenges in the past as a discipline. Click here for my take on KM problems in the past.
The Problem
Knowledge and standards were generally captured in written
form, which led to an abundance of Microsoft Word documents that were difficult
to search and a burden to continually refresh. Up to this point, access to
content was through best practice document and folder organization and
traditional search functions. In addition, it was a difficult challenge to
obtain feedback on the type of knowledge professionals were seeking or if they
found it.
The Solution
Black & Veatch began working with AI technology and passed
these engineering documents through a natural language processing scan to
identify topics eventually stored in a knowledge ontology that would be
leveraged in real-time chats initially to answer specific questions for
engineers working on a substantial number of projects. The company has a team
of 30 digital assistants online today that are being rolled out for general
use. The professionals who have been engaged so far are pleased with the
results and optimistic about the impact of the technology. While there are no
hard metrics, the comments have included positive developments such as reduced
searching, better feedback on dated content and engaged knowledge sharing. For
the first time, Black & Veatch now has visibility to the actual use and the usefulness of the content with various dashboards captured by monitoring the
traffic on the bots.
The Future
Black & Veatch expects to
continue to expand its knowledge sharing to include more topics if the success
continues with the current pilot. In addition, the company expects the content
will become more diverse to include voice, video and image content. These can
be used for equipment installation and maintenance training in the future as
well.
The case study was made possible by exClone Technology and Methods
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