{"slug":"city-of-helsinki-pilots-watsonx-ai-for-multilingual-customer-care-chatbot-translation","url":"https://findausecase.com/use-cases/city-of-helsinki-pilots-watsonx-ai-for-multilingual-customer-care-chatbot-translation","title":"City of Helsinki pilots watsonx.ai for multilingual customer care chatbot translation","description":"The City of Helsinki collaborated with IBM Client Engineering and IBM Consulting on a Proof of Value testing whether IBM watsonx.ai could translate foreign-language questions into Finnish for its customer care chatbot, which supports Finnish, English, and Swedish. Watsonx.ai scored 0.90 on the COMET machine-translation metric for English-to-Finnish translation (versus 0.91 for the incumbent system) and 0.87 for Swedish-to-Finnish (versus 0.86), performing on par with the city's existing translation solution.","company":"City of Helsinki","industry":"Government & Public Sector","country":"Finland","aiCapabilities":["Generative AI"],"businessFunctions":["Customer Service & Support"],"technology":["IBM watsonx.ai"],"deployment":"Unknown","problemStatement":"The City of Helsinki's customer care chatbot supports three languages (Finnish, English and Swedish) and needs to translate questions in a foreign language into Finnish, the chatbot's base language, to increase intent recognition, with a high bar set for translation quality.","solutionApproach":"IBM Client Engineering and IBM Consulting ran a Proof of Value with the City of Helsinki, facilitating a series of Innovate Workshops to design the approach and piloting watsonx.ai as a Large Language Model for translating foreign-language questions into Finnish, measuring quality with the solution's intent recognition metric and the open-source COMET machine-translation evaluation framework.","businessValue":"Watsonx.ai performed on par with the City of Helsinki's currently used translation system: for English to Finnish it scored 0.90 versus 0.91 for the current solution, and for Swedish to Finnish it scored 0.87 versus 0.86, out of 1.0 on COMET. The team concluded watsonx.ai could be the new translation solution for the City of Helsinki, though more planning and testing is needed before it is deployed.","evidence":{"band":"high"},"sourceUrl":"https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/city-of-helsinki-watsonx","dates":{"publishedAt":"2026-10-04T05:46:06.055Z","publishedAtSource":"pipeline","updatedAt":"2026-10-04T05:46:06.055Z"},"license":"Open for reading and citing with a link to https://findausecase.com/use-cases/city-of-helsinki-pilots-watsonx-ai-for-multilingual-customer-care-chatbot-translation. Bulk republication requires permission."}