The client is a private equity firm that invests in mid-market software, data, and analytics companies.
The Challenge
In the complex world of private equity, insights emerge from a team approach, with analysts and decision-makers sharing perspectives on business opportunities, best practices, guidelines, and operational and research reports. Our client – a leading private equity investor in mid-market software, data, and analytics companies – lacked a collaboration platform for internal interactions among its employees and key personnel of its subsidiary companies. One consequence was a lengthy lead time in deriving business insights from high volumes of business data. Further, the company needed to share operational reports with senior executives of its subsidiary companies, i.e., a “role-based” discussion board. The Chief Technology Officer decided that an AI-driven collaboration platform might be the answer.
The Solution
Persistent responded by developing a next-generation employee collaboration and knowledge management app, leveraging the power of various Microsoft technologies. The app delivers actionable business insights through a highly efficient and intelligent chatbot that accesses AI to analyze structured and unstructured data. Our team selected Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Power Apps as the collaboration platform to enable the creation of an internal intranet to manage and share files with company employees. SharePoint is designed for creating Web pages and document libraries, while presenting videos, news, and updates; Power Apps enables developers to quickly build automated workflows and dashboards, connected to multiple data sources.
The chatbot app is powered by Microsoft Azure Open AI and Azure Cognitive Search – employed together for intelligent processing and cataloging of large volumes of business information. Azure CognitiveSearch is a fully managed cloud search service that provides a better user experience for customers, offering key phrase extraction, optical character recognition (OCR), and role-based access control (RBAC) that our client required.
Persistent also deployed Azure Application Insights, an analytics service that monitors the performance and usage of live Web applications. We’re also providing managed services support for the entire application (including the chatbot) on an ongoing basis.
The Outcome
To date, the AI-driven intranet solution has achieved ~80% accuracy in chatbot-delivered answers to highly complex queries, and has significantly improved productivity, with increased information sharing through a properly structured role-based intranet communications channel. Thanks to the easy app-building tools in Power Apps, the new solution has an enhanced UX with a modern look and feel and greater ease of use. The bottom line, the firm now shares data far more effectively, enabling faster and better investment decisions.
Technology used:
- SharePoint
- Power Apps
- Azure OpenAI
- Azure Cognitive Search
- Azure Application Insights
