AWS re:Invent 2024 -Hours to minutes: The gen AI evolution in Convera's customer experience (AIM331)

Here is a detailed summary of the key takeaways from the video transcript in markdown format:

Convera's Journey with Rackspace and AWS

Introduction

  • Convera is one of the largest cross-border B2B payment companies, processing payments for 26,000 customers across 200+ countries and 140+ currencies.
  • Rackspace is a global organization with over 6,700 employees, an AWS Premier Partner, and a leader in public cloud services, data analytics, and machine learning.

Convera's Reimagination Journey

  • In 2022, when Convera's business was divested and acquired by a new investor, they saw it as an opportunity to reimagine their business processes and technology.
  • The key challenges they faced included:
    • Manually processing 130 shared email boxes for customer inquiries and service requests.
    • Needing to reduce the number of case types and subtypes by 50% to streamline their customer care process.
    • Lack of a suitable training dataset to use traditional ML approaches for the new case types.

Leveraging AI and AWS

  • Convera realized that AI, particularly generative AI, could help automate the email intake and classification process.
  • Rackspace's FAIR (Foundry for AI by Rackspace) team collaborated with Convera to:
    • Quickly set up a proof of concept and prove the value of the solution.
    • Address the challenges around data privacy, security, and the evolving nature of generative AI models.
  • The choice of AWS was driven by the need for speed of execution and the rapid pace of innovation, especially with services like AWS Bedrock.

Technical Architecture and Approach

  • The solution involved a series of Lambda functions and step functions to:
    • Ingest emails from AWS SES, redact PII data, and classify the emails.
    • Automatically create cases in Convera's case management system based on the email classification.
    • Provide fault tolerance and retry mechanisms to ensure reliability.
  • Rackspace's approach focused on building a "symbiotic, secure, and responsible" AI solution.

Key Outcomes and Lessons Learned

  • The solution resulted in a 95% reduction in the number of email boxes, 82% of cases being automatically created, and a significant improvement in customer response times.
  • Key lessons learned:
    • Be prepared to sacrifice some accuracy in the initial MVP to prioritize PII data protection and fast execution.
    • The rapid evolution of generative AI models requires a willingness to iterate and update the solution.
    • Label noise and PII data handling are significant challenges in building effective AI solutions.

Next Steps and Future Opportunities

  • Convera is exploring further opportunities to leverage AI and generative AI to improve productivity, enhance their software development lifecycle, and create new value for customers.
  • Rackspace sees the evolution of "agentic architecture" and the creation of intelligent assistants and co-workers as the future of generative AI in enterprises.

Conclusion

  • Convera and Rackspace's collaboration on this journey showcases the power of a three-party partnership (customer, systems integrator, and cloud provider) in successfully navigating the challenges of implementing innovative AI solutions.

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