The AE Hackathon gives customers and prospects 36 hours to come up with an innovative idea and a minimum viableproduct. The fifth edition of the Hackathon took place in June 2018. In this series, you will meet all the participants.
Working together for better advice
Under the name 'Team Tetris', Partena Professional and Wolters Kluwer joined forces during this hackathon to develop a tool that supports consultants in providing better advice to clients. Partena Professional started out from its advisory and supporting role to companies, while Wolters Kluwer, as their partner, focused more on technical development.
As such, entrepreneurs who need guidance in the area of HR can contact B2B consultants who give advice based on their expertise. Both Partena Professional and Wolters Kluwer try to answer these questions as accurately and completely as possible.
Time for efficiency and uniformity
In practice, it appears that many similar questions are asked, to which an answer has probably already been formulated previously. Nevertheless, consultants need to answer every question over and over again, without any prior knowledge of the previous advice given by colleagues.
Depending on the level of competence of the consultant, answers to similar questions may vary considerably. As such, the advice may differ in terms of quality or perspective. Consequently, bringing uniformity to answers is the aim of Team Tetris.
In addition, around half of the questions are relatively simple to answer, but the experts still take the time to formulate a comprehensive answer. This results in a time-consuming, inefficient process, whereby consultants have little time to really get to know the situation of the client. Instead, they get bogged down in a question-answer mode.
Artificial Intelligence with tailored advice
That is why Team Tetris devised My advisor, an Artificial Intelligence-driven tool which generates an answer based on advice previously given by experts. The tool can interpret a situation and looks for the most relevant response from a database of more than 200,000 documents. My advisor then uses this information to draw up a document with an answer to the client's specific question.
The consultant can validate or adapt this document to further refine the tool, so that it can provide even more accurate information over time. The tool needs to support consultants in their day-to-day activities, so that they can spend more time on the personal situation of their client.
Team Tetris had a large dataset at its disposal during the Hackathon. Following an analysis and clean-up, the team primarily focused on the conversations from mail traffic, given that this is the largest source of incoming questions.
The result from the Hackathon: a promising demo version
The demo version uses a rating system with thumbs up & down to evaluate the results. Getting a handle on the impact of this system, to allow the tool learn from feedback, was not straightforward. Consequently, more finetuning will be necessary as the project develops further.
Nonetheless, the result is a tool with which users are guaranteed to get a faster response and expert advice with proven quality. Moreover, the advice has been substantiated by multiple consultants, rather than just one person.
For their part, consultants can focus more on the personal guidance of their clients. Since the tool takes over a large part of the administrative burden, they can also further develop their expertise. The more the tool learns, the easier it becomes to offer advice from PartenaProfessional from anywhere and at any time.
