IBM's 2021 AWARD FINALIST CASE STUDY: Best Achievement in Operational Excellence to deliver Digital Transformation.

IBM - Lead to Cash Transformation with AI

The dynamic business landscape presents multiple challenges to IBM sales and support teams. The demands of the global environment and the connectivity offered by mobile devices require immediate access to data and support. Data is exploding at an unprecedented rate and finding the required trusted information is exceedingly difficult.

IBM’s Lead to Cash transformation initiative is designed to offer a fully cognitive-enabled sales experience using embedded Artificial Intelligence (AI) including IBM Watson technology, natural language processing, and advanced analytics. Through the use of integrated AI, the IBM Lead to Cash Cognitive transformation team was able to deliver a seamless user experience across multiple processes and tools. Strengthened by AI, our Lead to Cash tools interact with the customers using natural language, they gather required data across numerous sources, and provide immediate and accurate responses to client requests.

These AI solutions, all cloud-native, primarily using IBM Watson and other technologies were seamlessly integrated into our Lead-to-Cash processes and tools. This transformation journey focused on multiple areas including:

• Integrated AI
• Robust Virtual Assistant Support
• Intelligent Workflows powered by AI
• Improved insights through the Cognitive Enterprise Data Lake Platform.

A few examples of our integrated AI solutions include:

• BlueBot, robust virtual assistant guiding and coaching sellers and support teams across more than 35 domain areas of knowledge and available 24x7.
• WinSights, an AI-driven tool enabling sellers to build customized proposals faster.
• Contracting Language Analyzer helping intelligently identify and mitigate risks associated with the language used in the contracts to prevent revenue leakage.
• AI powered Contract Repository – A centralized repository to hold all of the executed contracts and built using IBM Watson’s text-analytics that uses innovative, market-leading natural language processing to search and understand contracts domain and its unique language within and across universe of contracts in the enterprise.

This initiative ‘Lead to Cash Transformation with AI ‘is part of the acceleration journey IBM is pursuing to become the premier Cognitive Enterprise. The aim is to accelerate and scale cognitive initiatives and practices across IBM and our clients, re-imagining IBM business platforms, intelligent workflows, and employee experience – treating IBM as "client zero" and showcasing it as the gold standard for Cognitive Enterprises.

These AI solutions were enabled at an unprecedented scale and with a focus on exceptional user experience. The Machine Learning (ML) models behind all three cognitive solutions auto-learn and provide value to the end-user. In addition, the content is continuously kept up to date by closely working with the business stakeholders and SMEs appointed for each domain area of knowledge.

The applications are built using microservices architecture and published as REST API to be incorporated within any system of record for seamless integration. Natural language processing is the underlying principle of all these solutions. The most innovative way of delivering solutions is made using multiple algorithms to understand the complex language and provide targeted response to the end-users taking advantage of the Cloud infrastructure and microservices architecture.

Digital Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards 2021