Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning Radically Transform How the VMware Business Interacts with Business Systems

VMware IT has increased its application footprint to deliver solutions for a variety of business needs, resulting in a distributed system that meets both domain needs and business goals. A distributed system approach, however, brings its own challenges because the data generated in the system resides in many different places.

The Business Operations team receives 120+ inquiries each workday–or more than 10,000 inquiries per quarter–about the status of the orders, opportunities, quotes, PO, invoices, renewals, etc. These inquiries arrive from various sources, including partners and distributors. Operations analysts must gather data from various Systems of Record, including sales order bookings, sales finance, geo sales, revenue, and work with other teams to respond to these inquiries. It can be time-consuming for the analysts to retrieve and validate the information for data quality and accuracy because they must access multiple systems to retrieve it. Each inquiry is manually tracked as a separate case. Depending on the number of systems involved, business groups may even reach out to IT to get additional information.

Our challenge was to create a self-service model that could automatically retrieve information and answer simple requests while maintaining a high level of responsiveness, quality, and customer satisfaction. A streamlined process would ensure faster responses and enable analysts to focus on more complex issues.

Automating a Bot Solution

IT developed next-generation vAssist.ai, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) platform to increase the responsiveness of some tasks. It enables Bot developers to train machine learning (ML) models for intent classification and entity extraction. vAssist is available as a SaaS model and exposes easy-to-use REST APIs to train and parse natural language inputs. It also provides a dashboard where developers can annotate and visualize data expressions and ML models in the cloud. We also integrated vAssist.ai with one of VMware’s chat platforms. Users can make service requests using the chat platform.

The Results

The biggest advantage of OM Assist is its self-service model, which delivers automated information 24×7 on the status of the orders, opportunities, quotes, POs, invoices, and renewals. The streamlined business process provides an integrated experience for users without any human intervention. By using emerging technologies, IT has created a scalable process that enables Business Operations to handle more inquiries and focus analyst efforts on resolving more complex requests without sacrificing responsiveness, quality, and customer satisfaction.