Sopra Steria builds turnkey virtual assistant on IBM Watson for European public and private clients

Overview

European digital transformation firm Sopra Steria evaluated 15 AI virtual assistant solutions and chose IBM watsonx Assistant, IBM Watson Language Translator, Natural Language Understanding, and Text to Speech to build an intelligent virtual assistant accelerator engine now running at 10 production sites across Europe. The first implementation, a central digital billing portal for the French government, handled more than 75,000 conversations and 340,000 requests to watsonx Assistant in its first month, resolving 80% of inquiries without human agents, and later scaled from 450,000 to more than 1.5 million users.

The challenge

Sopra Steria's customers needed an AI chatbot solution, but finding an intelligent virtual assistant that went beyond simple chatbot hype to actually solving customer issues was critical; requirements included round-the-clock assistance, increased customer support productivity, reduced operating costs, security, and the ability to manage complex dialogs.

The solution

After evaluating 15 AI virtual assistant solutions against a training set of more than 2,000 commonly used chatbot inquiry sentences, Sopra Steria chose IBM watsonx Assistant, IBM Watson Language Translator, Watson Natural Language Understanding, and Watson Text to Speech as the foundation for its intelligent virtual assistant accelerator engine, adding an orchestrator, front-end interface, external system connectivity, save/restore features and machine translation for rapid deployment. The engine runs on IBM Cloud and can also run on premises, built and deployed using Red Hat OpenShift.

Reported business value

The turnkey platform is successfully installed in 10 production environments across Europe. The first implementation, a central digital billing portal for the French government, handled more than 75,000 conversations and 340,000 requests to watsonx Assistant in its first month, expanded customer support hours around the clock without adding customer service agents, and today processes 80 percent of inquiries through to resolution, freeing representatives to focus on complex, nuanced, high-value issues; the billing portal scaled from 450,000 to more than 1.5 million users.