Case Study: #artificialintelligence at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), virtual agents are working to solve technical problems for employees who call the IT help desk. With a workforce of more than 30,000 employees, IHG recognizes significant gains in employee satisfaction.

IHG used #ml to review chat transcripts from customers contacting the help desk and constructed a virtual agent that could answer common questions. The result was a system that worked with the 150 help desk staff instead of replacing them.

IHG’s help desk can now scale to meet spikes in demand that might result from putting a new technology system in place. “We can scale up to meet what comes into our systems, but then scale down so that we don’t have excess capacity that we are paying for” Scot Whigham, Director IT Support at IHG. Instead of paying extra staff in times of low demand, the organization can redeploy resources to perform other important things on the IT to-do list.

For the tasks that it was trained for, the virtual agent system can now handle 80% to 85% of the volume of questions coming in. Even when the virtual agents can’t answer a question, they can help. The virtual agent system is able to collect basic information from the worker, regardless of whether it’s answering the question itself or handing it off to a help desk staffer. Whigham reports that among hotel workers who have engaged with the system, satisfaction rates remain high.