SCC and IBM AI Powered Virtual Assistants and Automation

Artificial Intelligence (AI)Digital Automation IBM IT Services IT Solutions Partners

18.06.2024

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Helping you Improve your Employee Experience

AI-powered virtual assistants and automation can enhance your employee experience and save time across your entire workforce.

When staff members struggle to find information in a maze of HR-related sources, valuable time is wasted. Managers and employees need to navigate through various HR apps using different channels, leading to frustration and significant time loss, with HR professionals repeatedly spending valuable time answering simple questions.

To improve employee experience and drive efficiency, IBM® watsonx™ Assistant leverages top-tier natural language understanding (NLU) to provide easy access to HR policies and automate frequently requested tasks. This cohesive HR support experience reduces employee frustration, enhances engagement, and lessens the operational burden on HR professionals, allowing them to focus on the human aspects of Human Resources. While the productivity gains are clear, it’s also imperative for this transition to be managed in an ethical and socially responsible fashion – mitigating any negative impacts on the workforce. By proactively reskilling employees and adapting business processes, organisations can stay ahead of the curve and prepare for an automation-focused future.

As an example of what’s possible, the HR team of a major UK healthcare trust came to IBM and SCC with the goals of improving job satisfaction, reducing costs and increasing efficiency. Together, they developed a proof-of-concept pilot virtual assistant, which acts as a 24/7 one-stop-shop for HR queries and tasks. It uses IBM watsonx.ai to retrieve relevant information from their HR documents, and summarises findings through retrieval-augmented generation. During the pilot, the lead time for completing routine queries and administrative tasks was cut from days to minutes. Once fully adopted, it is expected to save 6,000 staff hours, and will allow staff to prioritise strategic work over low-complexity, high-volume tasks. This will have knock-on benefits of increasing talent retention, job satisfaction, efficiency and sustainability across the HR team.

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SCC and IBM: Bringing people and technology together

Collectively, SCC services and IBM technology and expertise come together to address the collaborative partnership between humans and AI technologies. Our alliance can help you apply intelligent automation where it can drive the best efficiencies, and retrain employees to maximise their effectiveness in the areas where human skill sets are most needed:

IBM® watson x™

Three core components and a set of AI assistants designed to help you scale and accelerate the impact of AI with trusted data across your business. IBM® watson™ can be applied to a vast array of different business use cases, from recruitment procedures and performance reviews, to document processing and admin tasks.

SCC management and expertise

SCC has deep experience of all of IBM’s AI technologies, research and expertise, and understands how to leverage this knowledge and innovation in the right places, to augment existing staff and processes.

Talent development initiatives

IBM SkillsBuild courses and its apprenticeship programmes are supporting new digital talent to meet future demand for skills in areas like AI, machine learning, the practical application of AI in business, and using technology ethically. Additionally, the SCC Academy offers free interactive courses to help learners of all abilities improve their digital skills, from a core digital skill set through to specialist training in cyber security.

See how SCC and IBM are modernising HR in the NHS

A partnership of experience and expertise

With a successful partnership running for more than 40 years, SCC and IBM are perfectly placed to support the talent needs of every type of organisation, across the public and private sectors:

Integrated end-to-end solutions: we can cover the full talent lifecycle, including AI-driven workforce automation to transform the short-term, and skills development and apprenticeships for building towards the long-term.
Proven expertise and trusted governance: tried-and-tested methodologies, based on IBM’s research and innovation alongside SCC’s advice and expertise, mean we can tackle even the most complex digital transformation initiatives.
Continuous innovation: collaborative AI allows us to explore, test and implement the newest technologies rapidly, helping us constantly enhance our AI, automation and talent development capabilities.

Empower your workforce and maximise efficiency

The right technology and skills development will help you achieve your digital transformation goals. By automating high-volume, low-complexity and tasks, you can free-up valuable human resources to prioritise more strategic work.

Not only does this allow you to do more with less, but it also supports your employees to be more productive and improve their skills, thus empowering a more motivated, happy and loyal talent pool from within.

Explore a new balance of people and technology

Contact the SCC team today and discover how, together with IBM, we can help you nurture and AI enabled workforce.