Full transcript
0:00[MUSIC]
0:05First of all, thank you to Lupe and Sameer and
0:08the Microsoft team for having this session and
0:10allowing us to talk about our exciting transformation journey.
0:14We're partway through that right now,
0:16so we're excited to share where we are at,
0:18what we've done so far,
0:20and certainly there's so much more to come for us as well.
0:23I'm Steve Goodwin, Senior Director of
0:25Enterprise Applications at Graebel Companies.
0:27I've been in post for about six and a half years now,
0:30so quite a long time in technology,
0:33particularly with the advent of AI and how
0:36quickly everything is moving in that area.
0:39Shaun, pass it over to you.
0:41Yeah. Again, just echo that thanks to Lupe and Sameer for hosting.
0:46I'm Shaun Eades. I'm the Senior Director of
0:48Process Improvement over our Client Financial Services Department.
0:52Overseeing some of the accounts payable,
0:55just a number of areas,
0:58and that process improvement aspect has definitely taken on
1:03a new avenue with the implementation of
1:07Copilot and Cowork and all of those things.
1:10The things that I thought were automation years ago,
1:14Excel formulas are now yesterday's news.
1:17We love the direction we're going.
1:20In 14 and a half years with Graebel,
1:22it's just been one advancement after another,
1:25so we're really excited where this journey is going to continue to take us.
1:30Thanks, Shaun. Just some housekeeping.
1:32I have three different screens at the moment,
1:34and my chat and everyone's faces are on the far right.
1:37If you see me looking that way, that will be why.
1:40What are we going to do today? What are we going to talk about?
1:42First of all, we're going to introduce
1:44Graebel Companies and just talk about our journey so far as an organization.
1:48I think that's the important point to make,
1:51is how we've moved from what we were to what we'll be coming today,
1:55and Shaun will cover some pieces of that.
1:57We'll talk about our Be Bold initiative and what that really means for us.
2:02It's how our business transformation is being branded internally,
2:06but certainly Be Bold carries so many different positives for us,
2:10and we want to talk about that.
2:12Getting into the solutions, of course,
2:13is the key aspect of why we're here,
2:15talking about some of the solutions that we
2:17have deployed and are utilizing right now.
2:20That'll be a mixture of Power Platform,
2:23Copilot Studio, and some of the more
2:25advanced features around Copilot Studio as well.
2:28Then we're getting to key takeaways,
2:30which is our experience,
2:32what went well, what did not go so well,
2:34and where did we get those key learnings,
2:36and how did we bounce back from some of the failures that we did have.
2:40Then pass it back to Lupe and Sameer,
2:42we'll have a panel discussion around that.
2:45Shaun, I'm going to pass it over to you for the introduction to Graebel.
2:49Thanks, Steve. Graebel is a 75-year-old company.
2:54The name is familiar to some,
2:55not so much for others.
2:57Graebel started in Washtenaw, Wisconsin,
3:00Little Town Central Wisconsin with our founder,
3:03Dave Graebel, and he had an idea of taking a truck,
3:08and some friends, and helping people move across town,
3:12moving their actual household goods.
3:14That initial dream has expanded into what we are today.
3:21Not just dealing with individuals' household goods,
3:24but we are a global partner for a lot of
3:28very influential customers around the world,
3:32helping them with their client relocations,
3:36or I'm sorry, their employee relocations.
3:38As you can see, we cover 195 plus countries that changes every day.
3:44We're doing about 85,000 plus relocations of employees every year.
3:51It's a journey.
3:53There's more than just moving household goods involved in a relocation,
3:57especially when it's international.
3:59We assist our clients and their employees
4:02with everything from language training to visa and immigration,
4:06home sale, school tuition coverage,
4:10and then area tours, cultural training.
4:13You name it, a move, if anyone's ever done it,
4:18is one of the most stressful things that you can do in your lifetime.
4:23Graebel's goal, one of our goals is to make
4:26that as least stressful as possible for you.
4:32Lupe referenced in the beginning that we're a
4:35managed service provider with global mobility.
4:38What really is that?
4:40It's global mobility as a service.
4:43What do we provide?
4:44Well, these seven items on the screen are
4:47everything that get packaged together for us.
4:49It's the standard mobility service of cost estimates and surveys
4:55and all of that into a strategy conversation with our clients of
5:01how do they want their mobility and their services to be managed?
5:04What matters to them and what can we provide for them?
5:07We ensure that we take that with a compliance vision to make sure that
5:12we're managing and mitigating risks that may come up from their journeys,
5:18actively monitoring things,
5:20and we do it with a supply chain network that is very near and dear to our heart.
5:25We are a homegrown grassroots organization,
5:29and that's who we look for in a lot of our
5:31partners to make sure that the same service
5:34that Dave and his son Bill,
5:37who we have now in our chair and Ron as our CEO,
5:42envision an experience being.
5:44We want to make sure that who we put out on the ground is sharing that same vision
5:49and is doing things as we would like to do it.
5:53Now you bring into that,
5:55"That's great, we can do that, but what are we doing it with?"
5:57It's the technology, it's the innovation
5:59aspect that is really starting to set us apart
6:02from others in this space.
6:04The experience that our clients and their employees have when they're going through
6:08this process with us is top of the bar.
6:14Our expectation is continually improving that
6:16experience and improving the backend as well
6:19for the entire process on both ends.
6:25Thank you, Shaun. One of the key things that Shaun's touched on there is
6:30Graebel is a company that is family-owned.
6:33It started from very humble roots and it was very asset-driven.
6:37It was very much a man in a truck,
6:40going around and moving people's furniture and helping them relocate.
6:45We fast-forward 75 years now to where we are today
6:49and we find ourselves in a position where the world has changed.
6:52Graebel as a company has changed.
6:54Over time, we've diversified into different portfolios,
6:57we're attacking different marketplaces.
7:00One of the key things that we're having to really deal with,
7:03and I'd be interested in chat if other end users like us are in the same boat,
7:08clients are asking for more things,
7:10clients are asking for different things.
7:12The market is dictating to us that we have to change.
7:15What we have done as a company is started to
7:19really embrace that business transformation piece.
7:22We've been doing it for a while,
7:23but the injection of technology and the advancement of technology
7:27only accelerates that journey for us.
7:29We're trying to make ourselves as frontier as possible to use
7:33Microsoft terminology and really embrace that technology and take it
7:37into all of the experiences that we have.
7:40It really started with Ron Dunlap's,
7:43Ron Dunlap is our CEO, I should say.
7:45Started with Ron's initiative and challenge to
7:48the organization that we do have to be bold,
7:51that we need to look at different ways of doing things.
7:54The way we did it yesterday is not necessarily going to lead to success tomorrow.
7:58That is something that we need to really embrace.
8:01He's challenged the whole organization,
8:03not just the senior leadership,
8:05not just levels of management,
8:07everybody in the organization to be bold and to
8:10think differently and to challenge the way we do things,
8:13which I think is a really innovative approach and
8:16certainly lends itself to that frontier thinking as well.
8:19This is a short video from Ron just explaining what that means for us.
8:23Right now, this industry is ripe with challenges.
8:26That means it's ripe with opportunity and that means being focused,
8:30having a clear strategy,
8:31understanding where you're going to go as an organization,
8:34having the right teammates to get there.
8:36That means challenging yourself and being bold and thinking outside the box,
8:40trying new things and not fearing failure, actually celebrating it.
8:43If you don't try, you'll never succeed.
8:45I can tell you the greatest successes you have come with the greatest risk.
8:49If you're not willing to take them,
8:50you'll never have that great success story.
8:55Great words from Ron there and that certainly is
8:57echoed across all of our leadership group as well.
9:00Everybody, as I mentioned,
9:01is being challenged to think differently.
9:03We've started an initiative internally called Be Bold,
9:06which is very much a whole cultural shift for
9:10us because we haven't really done that before.
9:12Anyone who's been in an IT team before will know
9:14that you get lists and lists and lists of requests.
9:17You can only do so much to change and to make those things relevant.
9:22With this, we're trying to really push
9:25some of that power back into the organization.
9:29Shaun is a great example of that.
9:31His role is continuous improvement,
9:32but he's now got tools that five years ago, Shaun, you would never have.
9:36Let's be honest about that.
9:38Let it all.
9:38Shaun's doing great things with it.
9:40He's able to just run a little bit of IT overhead, of course,
9:44and making sure that we've got the right governance structures in play.
9:47Shaun's able to go and do things in his area and make changes
9:51that are improving the way that we work greatly in his domain.
9:57That's the type of initiative,
9:59that's the type of cultural impact we want to see more of across our organization.
10:04We're doing it through Microsoft Frontier Framework as well.
10:08Anyone who's seen that before will know that the four quadrants on the screen
10:11are very much the way Microsoft have approached how you do AI,
10:15how you do business transformation.
10:17We shamelessly borrowed that.
10:19In our ambition to be more frontier,
10:22we are really using these as the pillars in which we are operating.
10:26Everything we touch is, are we improving the employee experience?
10:30Are we making life easier for our people to
10:32perform the duties we're asking them to do?
10:35Are we reinventing the customer engagement process?
10:38Are we making sure that people are getting that personal experience,
10:42that it is hyper-personalized to them,
10:43that it is successful and that they do
10:45leave us with a sense of greater satisfaction?
10:49Are we reshaping our business processes?
10:51We are a company of massive manual processes and backlogs.
10:57What we deal with and the way we've done it in the past,
11:00again, is not going to be the success that carries us forward.
11:04So challenging that thinking, why do we do everything the way we do it?
11:08Why have we got so many manual processes that people take a long time to do?
11:11Can we bring technology in to change that and make that more seamless for us?
11:17Then lastly, bending the curve on innovation,
11:19that is the key piece around Be Bold.
11:21How do we get that creative problem solving as a signal from the organization,
11:27that it isn't just coming from the IT team,
11:29or it isn't coming from the senior leadership group?
11:32Again, to go back to Ron on this,
11:34he has said in numerous occasions,
11:36the greatest ideas for how this company is going to work in the future,
11:39are going to come from people lower down the organization.
11:42They're not going to come from the C-suite.
11:44It's going to be someone who is working in these business processes,
11:49who is in the trenches every day,
11:51is going to be the person who comes up with
11:53the best ideas on how we can do things differently.
11:56So that's just a glimpse into what we are as a company aiming for.
12:01This whole mantra around Be Bold,
12:03is certainly it's taken over a lot of our thinking internally,
12:07and it's how we're trying to position our company moving forward.
12:13Shaun, over to you.
12:15Thanks, Steve.
12:15Just to expand on a couple of things that Steve said,
12:18we have manual processes.
12:21So I've said I've been with the company 14.5 years.
12:24When I started, there were paper time sheets that were put on my desk,
12:28that I had to audit by hand and then manually key into a system.
12:34At that point, we didn't even necessarily have imaging to compile that stuff.
12:38So 14 years ago,
12:40we were doing things manually compared to how we're doing them today.
12:43I can't even think as to how they were done 75 years ago.
12:48The other aspects that really grabs me from what Ron said is the failure aspects.
12:57So some of the things that you're going to see,
12:59we didn't create immediately and have wonderful success at them.
13:04We failed fast.
13:05That's the key.
13:06Have a Be Bold idea and don't be afraid.
13:10Somebody had it in the chat or feel the fear and do it anywhere.
13:14Anyway, make sure you fail so that you can learn it.
13:18That failure, especially if you're doing it at a leader level,
13:21helps empower your frontline people to realize it's okay to make mistakes
13:25and it's okay to challenge the normal.
13:28We don't ever want to hear that, "Well, that's how we've always done it."
13:31If we have that idea that we're never going
13:33to move forward with some of these things.
13:36So the other aspect about those Be Bold ideas is AI is the buzzword.
13:44Everyone wants AI, but not every solution is AI.
13:48It doesn't have to be.
13:50Agents have a place, but they're not needed for everything.
13:55So a couple of the things that we'll show you on the screen now
13:57are things that I've built as a citizen deveLuper.
14:02I'm not IT, I have an accounting background,
14:04but I had a curiosity to do things differently
14:07and provide an opportunity for my team to be more efficient.
14:13So hearing the background of what Graebel is,
14:16you can imagine the number of invoices
14:19that we get from suppliers on a regular basis.
14:22If it's tied to those services have to be compliant with what
14:26our clients need from regulatory purposes,
14:29tax guidelines, just their internal HR policies.
14:33There's an opportunity for things to be incorrect on those invoices.
14:39Those invoices sometimes need to be rejected back to the supplier.
14:42So one of the first things that you'll see here is
14:45actually a process built entirely in Power Platform right now.
14:50The team is finishing up testing on,
14:52and we hope to deploy probably in the next couple of weeks,
14:55maybe a month.
14:57Steve, if you want to play the video, I'll kind of narrate over the top of it.
15:02So we're looking at D365 Dynamics 365 Finance Operations,
15:07pending vendor invoices.
15:08So the one highlighted on the screen will use as an example.
15:12Something was wrong with the invoice when we received it,
15:14so we need to reject that invoice.
15:17The process that the teams do today is very manual.
15:22I'm not sure it's playing anymore, Steve.
15:25There we go.
15:26It's a very manual process.
15:28So what we built is a Microsoft form that allows them to identify the reasons
15:33why that invoice needs to be rejected.
15:36And we view standardization.
15:37There's very specific reasons that could be selected for that rejection,
15:42whether it's externally back to the supplier.
15:45It could be internally.
15:46Maybe we've just allocated it wrong in our system through automation.
15:50The analyst populates a few other pieces of information,
15:55who should get the rejection notification,
15:58and then where inside dynamics it exists from a legal entity perspective,
16:02identifying the invoice number, the line reference,
16:05and then having the opportunity to add some additional comments.
16:09So once they take the time to fill this out, which is about 30 seconds,
16:13they'll hit Submit, and then all the magic happens.
16:17So what we'll see is that there are a few things that will happen.
16:25They get the notification that the response was submitted.
16:29Power Automate flow begins to execute.
16:31We can monitor that as it comes through.
16:35Notice that it's running.
16:36You'll see the history of the duration on there.
16:39Most of them are 30, 40 seconds, maybe a minute.
16:44That's all the time it takes for the entire automation to be submitted.
16:45It takes for the entire automation to run.
16:47And that automation will do a few things.
16:50It will go into dynamics, into that vendor invoice record,
16:56and it will standardize an on hold reason within the record
17:01so that it makes it easier for us to report.
17:04It identifies who did the rejection, the date, external,
17:07all of the reasons that they selected.
17:09It places the invoice itself on hold so it can't be processed.
17:13It updates who was the person that was doing that rejection
17:18and identifies that it's rejected.
17:21It also generates an email that then gets attached
17:25to that vendor invoice record so that we have an audit trail.
17:28We have confirmation of this invoice was rejected,
17:32and an email notification was sent out to that supplier,
17:36giving them the information of the invoice, the reasons,
17:39and what to do if they're submitting a correction,
17:44all noting that this is an automated generated email
17:49so that they don't reply directly to that.
17:52And then we go into SharePoint in that same process
17:55and we create an entry that logs that rejection
17:57so that we have a history of all those projections
18:01using that information.
18:03So, Steve, if you want to pause it for one second.
18:06So, that whole process, it took me longer to explain it
18:10than it actually takes for it to run.
18:13But for someone to do that manually,
18:15depending on the complexities of that invoice,
18:17is an 8 to 12 minute process, creating an email,
18:21generating a separate rejection letter, updating dynamics,
18:24sending it out, updating a log.
18:28So, we've essentially reduced, on average,
18:31a 10 minute process down to 30 seconds.
18:34This next one is also kind of related to vendor invoices.
18:40So, hundreds, thousands of invoices come in daily
18:43and our suppliers want to know where it's at in the system.
18:46So, we asked them to send us an aging statement
18:48on a monthly basis.
18:50So, we've got some mocked up data here
18:52with a number of records.
18:56And if anyone's ever received a supplier statement,
18:59he'll know that it's not consistent
19:01across your entire network.
19:02They, especially from an international perspective,
19:05there may be different date formats or number formats,
19:08or one supplier may call a column invoice number,
19:13but another may call it a factura
19:15because it's international or it's invoice
19:17abbreviated with a hashtag behind it.
19:20So, there's all kinds of variations.
19:22So, it's a very manual process today
19:24for our statement reconciliation team to go through these.
19:28It's a lot of V lookups.
19:29It's a lot of exports, other dynamics,
19:31the various pending posted paid grids.
19:34So, what we've done here is we've taken their statement
19:37and we've allowed Power Automate to reconcile it for us.
19:43Hang up in the video.
19:47So, we've created an intake library.
19:50So, when we received that statement,
19:51we simply drop that file into this library
19:55and it's going to ask for two pieces of information.
19:57It's going to ask for the dynamics vendor number
20:00and then the received date
20:01so that we can record that information.
20:03So, once those two pieces of information are populated,
20:07it's the trigger for Power Automate
20:09to continue on to the next processes.
20:14So, what will happen during that whole process
20:16is it's going to standardize
20:19the information in the header of the statement.
20:22So, whereas we said one could be invoice abbreviated
20:26with a hashtag, another could be a invoice number
20:29fully written out, the automation,
20:32which we're just hung up a little bit here.
20:34Sorry about that.
20:36We'll standardize all of that
20:38and we've created a normalization registry
20:42to help with that standardization.
20:49Those.
20:50So, we'll just let the video catch up just a tad.
20:54So, again, this is the part where we're putting in
20:56the account number and the date.
20:59[AUDIO OUT]
21:05The automation will trigger based off of that entry
21:08and then this should be our normalization registry.
21:12So, at the supplier level, we identify
21:16what should be in those various column headers.
21:19So, what do they say is in invoice column?
21:21What do they say is in currency or invoice date?
21:24It allows us to identify
21:27if their dates are European format,
21:30if the numbers are European format,
21:32or if their statement is broken up into sections
21:35with multi-currency.
21:37So, as the flow triggers, the first thing it does
21:41is it goes out and finds this vendor record in the registry.
21:45If it can't find it, we get an email basically saying,
21:48"Hey, you don't have this one set up yet.
21:50We can't do that reconciliation."
21:53And provides a link back to the file,
21:55a link to the SOP for us to do the correction,
21:58and a link to the registry.
22:00All things being good, the automation then continues
22:03and does a number of queries directly in the dynamics
22:08and standardizing things like the invoice number,
22:12which may come across with spaces,
22:16hashtags, special characters, as you can see them
22:18in the various cells in the slide right now.
22:22And it does that normalization of the records in D365
22:25as well.
22:26So, we're comparing apples to apples.
22:30Once all the reconciliation is done,
22:33it creates an original statement in a supplier folder
22:37and then a reconciled statement.
22:38So, the original is exactly what they sent us
22:41so that we have proof of that original.
22:44And then the reconciled statement is in a completely
22:46different format that we've standardized across the board.
22:49So, what we give out to our suppliers is easier for us
22:54to digest.
22:56It contains all the information that they've given us,
22:59invoice number, amount, invoice date, status.
23:03So, we've standardized our status,
23:04whether something is pending payment, it's rejected,
23:08exception, there's an amount mismatch, it could be paid.
23:11There could be a missing on here as well.
23:14And as this is pulled in, it includes the D365 on hold
23:19reason to why it was rejected if that was the case,
23:22or it shows the paid date, the paid amounts,
23:24currency, so on and so forth.
23:26Also identifies via conditional formatting
23:28if something is extremely aged on that statement.
23:33And this automatic ultimately is what our statement analysts
23:38get via an email notification.
23:42It also logs at a line level in a SharePoint list,
23:45every single line that was on that statement
23:47so that we have a full audit history.
23:49Ultimately, when the analyst gets that confirmation
23:54that the statement's been reconciled,
23:56all they have to do today is double check things
23:59that maybe have a mismatch or are missing.
24:01Everything else is ready, and then they can immediately
24:03send it out to the supplier.
24:05So, between those two solutions, all driven in Power Platform,
24:10we've had a huge time savings, minimizing human error
24:14through the process, and everything is standardized.
24:17There's logic behind it now.
24:18So, it makes it a lot easier for external parties to consume.
24:25Cool. Thanks, Shaun.
24:28Let's move on to the next one.
24:33This is James Welsh, Shaun.
24:35This is James Welsh, yes.
24:37Yembo is a partnership that Graebel just recently undertook.
24:43We have become one of the first to actually use this.
24:47So, if we think about the initial part of Graebel
24:51of moving somebody's household goods,
24:55as things are being packed, is there a possibility
24:58that something gets dinged, something gets broken
25:00in transit or in placement?
25:02Maybe something got left in a room,
25:06and we didn't realize it, right?
25:07Mistakes happen.
25:08Movers are human.
25:11In the beginning, as the move is getting set up,
25:15there's a visual, a video survey of all of the rooms
25:19in the home that are done that feed into Yembo,
25:23so that at the time of the move completion,
25:27if something, a dresser drawer is broken,
25:30the employee can take pictures of that,
25:33and it will associate directly back to that original survey
25:37and be able to facilitate faster decisions
25:41for that individual, as well as our claims adjusters,
25:44to go, "Is this a replacement? Is this a repair?"
25:47It creates a huge open communication for them
25:53with transparency.
25:55Everybody can see the same thing,
25:57and it also is learning.
25:59So, there's definitely AI behind Yembo of,
26:02"How can this be prevented in the future,
26:04and what's the best case outcome for this?"
26:08So, the teams are loving using this right now.
26:11It's made a lot of improvements in their process
26:14and allows them to address claims a lot more timely.
26:18So, huge benefit, huge win for this partnership for us.
26:24Excellent. Thank you, Shaun.
26:27So, let's move into some of the other agentic solutions
26:31that we have built internally.
26:33Just to follow up on what Shaun was talking about
26:36on Power Automate first, actually.
26:38We've done a lot more around that area as well.
26:41We've got an AP invoice automation procedure,
26:43which we're not going to show today,
26:45but that deals with so many exceptions
26:48and so many crazy things that our company does,
26:52and Shaun was instrumental in that as well.
26:54But we are trying to use Power Automate and Power Apps
26:57and Power Pages too, across multiple areas
27:00of our organization to just make life easier.
27:04Process data quicker, get access to information
27:09and get access to decision-making much,
27:10much faster than we've done previously.
27:12And it ties nicely into what we're doing here
27:14with what we call knowledge scouts.
27:18We've got multiple of these across our organization right now,
27:20but the one you're seeing at the moment
27:22is very much focused on a test client that we have
27:26and test data that has been created
27:28just to show how could you surface information
27:31from policies, from exception reporting,
27:35anything that basically supports
27:37that whole transfer process.
27:40We get a lot of questions from a lot of clients
27:42as to what is going on with the move,
27:44how much have we spent so far,
27:46how does that come up against the budgetary aspects.
27:51A lot of information comes into our consultants
27:53and a lot of requests.
27:55Previously, this could be very much a,
27:57if you're on a call with a client,
27:59it could be, "I need to get back to you.
28:01I don't have that information right now."
28:04We're finding with the use of AI tools like this,
28:06where we can surface that data very quickly,
28:09we can positively impact those customer experiences
28:12because we can get the data straight away.
28:15It's a simple question to a chatbot basically,
28:18which is hosted on our SharePoint sites
28:21to pull that client level information
28:23and give that information very, very quickly.
28:26What you see on the screen,
28:27it's just a repeat of the same thing over and over and over,
28:30but hopefully it gives you an understanding
28:33of how we're deploying things like this
28:35across multiple areas of our organization.
28:38And now our supply development group, for example,
28:41have something on their sites as well
28:42as to getting to the information really, really quickly.
28:46We've got HR-related ones.
28:48We've got stuff in more of the operations areas as well,
28:51some in IT too, just to surface that information
28:55and try and get to the point of information
28:57much, much quicker than we've done previously.
29:00Again, coming back to what we mentioned earlier,
29:03we live in an on-demand world
29:04and people are expecting answers immediately.
29:07They don't want to wait for anything anymore.
29:09So deploying tools like this has really helped us
29:12to surface that data quickly,
29:15because as Shaun can tell you,
29:17we deal with masses and masses and masses of data
29:20every single day.
29:21Just a single move for a client could hit on multiple policies
29:26and each of those policies could be 10 to 20 pages deep
29:31with various information in there
29:32about eligibility criteria,
29:35what this person can get
29:36if they are of a certain grade in their organization.
29:39It's a lot of data and expecting our people
29:42to go through that and really know it in depth,
29:45probably an ask too far,
29:46but surfacing information like this using Copilot
29:50helped us tremendously.
29:52We actually had some surveys done with the teams
29:55that are using this and they found that they were responding
29:58far, far quicker, that they were able to get
30:00to that information far quicker.
30:02The trust in this actually increased
30:04because of the citations and the ability
30:06to actually get to the source data very quickly
30:08and double check, yes, it's accurate.
30:11That increased very, very quickly for us.
30:14One of the funniest things I found with this,
30:16we deployed it for a particular client
30:18and one of the comments on the survey results
30:21really interested me.
30:23A guy had responded,
30:25"The agent was able to find an answer to a question
30:27I've had for three weeks."
30:29Which is great, but my question backwards
30:32was why did you wait three weeks to get an answer?
30:34That just doesn't add up to me.
30:37But it shows you that it's finding things
30:38that some of our people maybe can't find
30:41because there's just too much information.
30:43So again, great use case that we've got out there.
30:47We're deploying more and more of these as we go.
30:50We see this as being a big part of our service delivery
30:52moving forward as well.
31:00Moving on to the next one,
31:00which is our request for proposal agent.
31:03So we have built this with our partner, GetAI,
31:07and they've really helped us to tap into that
31:10more heavy duty pro code solutioning
31:13using the Azure framework.
31:15So this is using, I think it's based on Claude now,
31:18did start off on OpenAI models,
31:20but we've migrated over to Claude
31:22because we just felt it was giving us a better experience.
31:25But the technology around this is great
31:27and certainly GetAI have helped us to approach that quicker.
31:32That learning curve is pretty steep
31:34if you're trying to do this on your own
31:35and you don't have much experience.
31:37So having a vendor like GetAI,
31:39or a partner I should say like GetAI,
31:41help us on this journey has really accelerated
31:44our use and adoption of some of these tools.
31:47But what is this?
31:49For us, requests for proposals are a very commonplace activity.
31:54We get over 100 of them every year.
31:57They come from various clients from various industries
32:00and every single one of them is very detailed.
32:04You're talking hundreds and hundreds of questions
32:07that need to be answered.
32:08And they cross multiple domains.
32:10It's not just about service delivery.
32:12It can be about financial strength.
32:14It can be about information security policies.
32:17It certainly is of late.
32:19How do we handle AI?
32:21How does it handle data?
32:22What provisions you have in place?
32:25You get the point.
32:25It crosses multiple areas of our organization.
32:29Finance, IT, operations.
32:32Everybody gets a piece of this.
32:34And the way we've been doing it previously is very much
32:38we receive a tender response or a request for proposal.
32:43We will form that out to multiple people
32:45to say help us answer these questions.
32:47Yes, we will leverage what we've done previously
32:49on other RFPs if they are within industry
32:52or very much within a similar mindset to the RFP
32:56that we have open.
32:58But it's a lot of time spent.
33:00And the other piece around this is we normally have
33:02very, very tight deadlines to go and respond to this.
33:06And obviously, as an organization,
33:08we want to put our best foot forward.
33:10We want to make sure that we answer everything
33:12as best as we can to give ourselves
33:14the best opportunity of winning that business.
33:18But it takes up a lot of time.
33:20And a lot of our people do not have that time either.
33:23A lot of other things to do.
33:25So what we've deployed here,
33:26and I'll just kick this video off actually
33:28while we talk through it.
33:30What we've deployed here is a tender agent
33:32that takes care of that for us.
33:33It's designed to create that first draft
33:37and move our people away from creating information
33:40and filling out questions to reviewing
33:43what the agent has done for us based on historic data,
33:47based on prior RFPs, based on industry knowledge,
33:51based on searches that it's done,
33:52and the ability that it can compile all of this information
33:56and really complete these questions for us.
33:59You can see on screen, it starts with SharePoint.
34:02It goes through all of the different formatting
34:04and that is there.
34:05It is linked to AI Foundry.
34:07We are utilizing multiple models to push this through
34:10and use content understanding.
34:13The real benefit of this is it's a chat interface.
34:18Our RFP team can just interact with the agents,
34:21ask it questions, ask it to refine documentation
34:24if we wanted to,
34:26ask it to reference other RFPs if we wanted to,
34:30and it will take that action for us.
34:32So again, moving away from that whole,
34:35we've got a new RFP.
34:36I need to give this to the InfoSec team.
34:38There's 20 questions on here that we need to answer.
34:42Instead, now we can say the 20 questions have been populated.
34:46It's now a verification of is the information correct?
34:49Is there anything we want to add to it?
34:51And that's a huge game changer for us.
34:53The ability to get this done quickly,
34:56the speed at which we can respond, it's huge.
35:00You can see here, it's going back and saying,
35:02please recreate the response for question two
35:04and reference something else, which it didn't do before.
35:08So really, really powerful.
35:10You can see the level of the information
35:11that it's putting together.
35:13Anyone who's worked with chatbots before
35:15or AI in general, which ensures everyone on this call,
35:19it gives you good information.
35:20It's how we want to provide that information
35:23and present it back to the client that is important.
35:27It's recommending a SME review here, which is great,
35:29because again, it gives us that targeted information
35:32to say there's something more that needs to be done.
35:35But this is a huge help for all of us
35:37who are involved in these processes.
35:39You can see more of the architecture here.
35:46It is using multiple components within the Azure AI Foundry.
35:52And then as you say,
35:53we get to that collaborative documentation
35:55where it is very much, we have an output file,
35:58but we can still talk to the agents
36:00and really verify and refine as we go.
36:05So a great experience for us for sure.
36:05So, we're going to go back to the next slide. So a great experience for us for sure.
36:12And one of the things that we found really interesting
36:15with this is the ability for it to take information
36:19from different industries and apply it.
36:22So we may get an RFP that is from a company
36:25who are very sustainability focused.
36:29We can actually have the tone of the RFP
36:31created with sustainability as the number one priority,
36:34just ask the agent to really infuse that throughout,
36:37which is again, if you're doing that manually,
36:39it can be difficult.
36:41But having AI generate that first draft for you
36:43is super, super powerful.
36:47So that's the first of the more,
36:48what we call the pro code solutions here.
36:52The other one is one we're very proud of.
36:55I think Graebel are one of, if not the first company
36:58to deploy computer use agents with Microsoft
37:01in the US at least.
37:03And we're using this to supplement
37:06a very heavy manual effort right now.
37:10So we work with a legacy system that doesn't really
37:14have modern integration capability.
37:17And it is difficult to work with.
37:19And we've had a lot of people undertaking manual processes
37:24for the creation of what we call service orders,
37:26which is effectively an instruction
37:28to our supply chain base to perform services
37:32on behalf of our clients.
37:34So I'll manage through this one legacy system.
37:37Again, our people are manually keying the states are in,
37:40or certainly were until we put this solution in play.
37:44Manually keying that data in,
37:45there's the opportunity for failures in there.
37:48Everybody gets something wrong every now and then.
37:52We can get incorrect information going in there,
37:55requires further review, et cetera, et cetera.
37:57But the biggest part of this is the volume.
38:00We can deal with over 150,000 service orders.
38:04Per annum across multiple clients with multiple
38:07suppliers attached to them.
38:09It's a lot of manual work.
38:10And the accuracy around it is very important.
38:13So what we chose to do here, with the guidance of GetAI
38:17again and the support of GetAI in building the solution,
38:20we deployed what we call our service order agents.
38:24So let's take a look at this one.
38:28So our existing process starts with a trigger from Outlook,
38:32which will pick up Power Automate and move that information
38:35into a solution with the agent.
38:39From there, we use content understanding to scrub that data
38:43and get it over to Cua, computer use agents.
38:47You can see on the right-hand side of the screen,
38:49it performs the steps that a individual will perform
38:52based on an instruction set configured with natural language.
38:57So everything that it does, it logs into the VM,
39:00it logs into our legacy system, it performs the exact same steps
39:04that a user would in creating a new entry,
39:07what we call an A-Pro.
39:10It'll create that new service order structure.
39:12It will go through the screen using the instruction set
39:14and using the information that's provided from the email.
39:18And it will start to populate all that information
39:20directly into the legacy system.
39:23Once it's done all that, the most important part for us
39:25is the human in the loop content here.
39:28So we will, the agent will spit out what it's done over email to say,
39:33perform the duties, I was able to get 90% of it done.
39:37Here's the piece that I was not able to complete,
39:39or it'll give you a full success and just say,
39:41everything's been completed.
39:43It'll also put all of that information into the legacy system.
39:47So we actually have a shell that can be sent directly
39:50to the supplier that we're going to issue this to.
39:53But we have not taken that step of allowing the agent
39:57to make those decisions for us.
39:59It's very much a data population effort for us right now.
40:02We have multiple different types of service order
40:05which have different structures, different areas
40:08within the system that it will contact.
40:10But the computer use agent is taking all of that manual effort away
40:14and really populating this information for us,
40:16which is a huge win for us.
40:19And it comes back to how are we deploying our resources?
40:22Can we take away the transactional elements
40:26and focus them more on client interactions
40:28and helping to improve that client experience?
40:33So really cool technology, it's been a tremendous help to us.
40:40So that's the end of the demos that we wanted to cover.
40:42We do have other ones that we, as I mentioned earlier,
40:46multiple applications of Power Automate
40:48and more of the Power Platform across our organization.
40:51We are doing more and more with agents every single day.
40:54But we did want to talk a little bit about where we see this going,
40:59some of the problems that we've had,
41:00and I'll pass it over to Shaun to take us through the key takeaways.
41:04Yeah, thanks, Steve.
41:05The first key takeaway is critical.
41:09AI is only as smart as your data.
41:11So we did not just create these solutions one day
41:15when we woke up and they worked perfectly, right?
41:18AI is only good as the data you have.
41:22So we've gone through a lengthy period of time
41:25where we've had our departments and key stakeholders
41:28go and look at the data that we have,
41:31make sure that it's not in four different places
41:33and with different file names.
41:35So we've done a data cleanup effort,
41:37which is really one of the first steps in the journey, right?
41:40You have to have that clean data
41:42because the AI is only good as what you have.
41:45So if you've got bad data in, you're going to get it out as well.
41:49So I can add a point there, Shaun.
41:51Sorry to interrupt.
41:52Couple of things on this one.
41:55The knowledge scout that we showed earlier,
41:58when we did the first iteration of that,
42:01it was a train wreck and it wasn't because of the AI.
42:05It was because our data was in such a terrible state.
42:09What it led us to believe though,
42:10or sorry, what it led us to realize is
42:14AI is great at exposing where you are weak.
42:16[LAUGHTER]
42:18So we were able to build that muscle and really say,
42:20how do we do this in other areas and clean up our SharePoint sites?
42:24I'm sure there's multiple people on this call who have this right now.
42:28Anyone in your organization have folders that say, do not use.
42:32Well, the AI is seeing those things.
42:34Archive, great.
42:36Let's put it somewhere else where the agent doesn't need to see it,
42:39or let's go into SharePoint and turn those things off
42:41so the agent doesn't see it.
42:44But we had a lot of that.
42:45Let's just plug it in, it'll work.
42:48Yes, it will work to an extent,
42:49but it will start to expose where you've got problems,
42:52which is good and bad.
42:54If you don't want to know where the problems are,
42:56then don't deploy it.
42:57But if you do, you best go and fix that to make this usable.
43:02The other thing that we've done as well,
43:03which we weren't going to touch on today,
43:05but Data Lakehouse is one of our major projects
43:08that is coming to a close right now.
43:11And the whole basis of that is we would have a complete clean
43:14gold-level data set that we can plug our AI tools into
43:19and really rely and trust that data to be fully accurate
43:23from all of our systems.
43:25So we're on the precipice of having that,
43:27and we're really excited about the capabilities
43:30that we'll have as soon as that is available to us.
43:33Sorry, Shaun.
43:35That's okay.
43:36And I'll wrap up quick because Lupe's playing the
43:39"get off the stage" music for me.
43:40[LAUGHTER]
43:43But all of this that we've shown has taken time.
43:49And it's all with the backstory of AI is so the front line
43:53story of everything that it's changing every day.
43:56We've had conversations with Microsoft of,
43:58"Hey, this is what's coming next,
43:59but it will change tomorrow."
44:02So making sure you start to develop an idea of what you
44:04really want to accomplish and then finding a partner
44:06to help you with it internally grow it.
44:09And making sure that you've got governance.
44:12The data is key, but also governance.
44:14If you just give AI to everybody in your team,
44:17who knows what's going to come out?
44:19So make sure that you've got those controls.
44:21And then finally, which is probably the most important
44:23takeaway, is AI is no good or automation is no good
44:28unless you've got the people behind it
44:31that understand the processes that support the implementation.
44:34So combining people and purpose with AI
44:37is how you're really going to achieve success.
44:40So we appreciate the time.
44:42Thank you for that.
44:43And Lupe, it's all yours.
44:46Thank you so much, Shaun and Steve from Graebel
44:50for sharing your AI journey and the real world
44:52innovation stories here with us at CAT AI webinar audience.