Barista Live: Enhanced AI Employee Experiences

Barista Delivers More Expansive Searches and Self-Learning Capabilities to Deliver Industry Leading Deflection Rates and Employee Adoption

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SANTA CLARA, Calif., November 7, 2023 – Espressive, the pioneer in automating digital workplace assistance, today revealed Live Generative Answers, a new capability within the company’s generative AI-based virtual agent Espressive Barista. Barista can already resolve employee issues through end-to-end automations and by leveraging internal knowledge repositories for concise answers. Now with Live Generative Answers, Barista can source answers from multiple places outside an organization, either from public sources on the internet, or from large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Google Bard. Powered by generative AI, the Barista Experience Selector understands the intent of an employee interaction in order to take the correct action that will provide the best response. Barista harnesses automation and several AI technologies, including LLMs, to expediently automate what a service desk agent does, acting as an extension of the team and taking on the work of a regular agent. Through this approach, Espressive delivers 55 to 67% deflection rates on average—the highest in the industry—and the highest employee adoption of over 80% on average.

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“Organizations haven’t fundamentally transformed the service desk in the past 30 years. While ITSM tools have certainly progressed, they are still adding headcount and almost 100% of the tickets require humans to resolve,” said Pat Calhoun, founder and CEO of Espressive. “Barista provides CIOs the ability to reduce cost, improve productivity and securely leverage LLMs and generative AI to drive business results in 6-8 weeks. With our new Live Generative Answers capabilities, Barista can now collect data from multiple sources both internally and externally to ensure employees are getting the right answers quickly. Barista proactively resolves issues to transform the employee experience.”

Service Desk Dilemma: CIOs Battle Costs, Employees Seek Answers Beyond ITSM

CIOs consistently experience challenges regarding high cost and poor employee experience when interacting with the service desk. Sweeping mandates for the swift adoption of LLMs and generative AI to boost productivity are also forcing CIOs into a race against time, amplifying their concerns over associated risks. Compounding these challenges, employees are frustrated by the lack of progress within ITSM which has resulted in them finding ways around the help desk and leaning on outside LLMs, like ChatGPT, for answers to their questions.

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According to the 2023 Pulse Report for IT Service Management, there was a 50% increase in the number of respondents using a virtual agent in 2023 versus 2022, suggesting an upsurge in willingness to try new technology for employee self-help. Separate research also found that 43 percent of employees simply rely on consumer versions of ChatGPT and 68 percent reported they don’t disclose their usage. This opens enterprises up to threats regarding personally identifiable information (PII) leaks and data breaches that harm individuals and the organization.

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While LLMs seem to have the answer to everything, they can mislead employees when it comes to work-related questions. LLMs do not have context for individual organizations and therefore will not have accurate answers to employee work related questions, such as their work 401(k) programs. LLMs are also trained for a period of time before their content freezes—for instance, ChatGPT 3.5 froze in January of 2022. Despite these limitations, this will not stop an LLM from hallucinating an answer, providing a response that looks correct to an employee but is wrong. In addition, while LLMs are great at providing generative answers, AI language models do not have direct access to enterprise systems or workflows, and therefore cannot trigger automations.

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“Employees call the help desk in the first place because they just want their problems solved,” continued Calhoun. “What we have come to realize is that 63% of deflections come from solving problems with end-to-end automation versus simply giving an answer.”

A Multi-Source Approach to Employee Questions: Combining AI Technologies for the Best Outcome

With Live Generative Answers, Espressive Barista can now, in addition to leveraging an organization’s knowledge, source answers from multiple places outside an organization, such as from LLMs or live data available on the internet. However, Live Generative Answers are just one part of the Barista Experience Selector, a unique technology that can identify multiple outcomes and choose the best option for resolution by understanding the intent of an employee interaction. For example, if an employee asks, “What is our paternity leave policy?” the Experience Selector will search internal knowledge for the answer. However, if an employee asks, “How many days am I legally allowed for paternity leave?” the Experience Selector will supplement the corporate policy with broader internet search or LLM to find the right answer based on the employee’s location.

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By combining AI technologies to enhance search abilities and access information from a variety of sources, the Experience Selector can achieve automated resolution of employee questions in a matter of seconds through the following process:

1. Automate Resolution: When appropriate, the Experience Selector will always automate resolution to the problem first. Employee questions such as, “How do I reset my password?” can be addressed with end-to-end automation and no human involvement, achieving resolution without the employee ever leaving the virtual agent.
2. Knowledge Synthesizer: If automation cannot solve the issue, the Experience Selector then leverages enterprise content via Espressive’s state of the art Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) capability, called Knowledge Synthesizer. When an employee asks a question like, “What is the office Wi-Fi?” the Knowledge Synthesizer will scan all of an organization’s content repositories (e.g., Confluence, Microsoft SharePoint) in order to provide the exact answer, while only showing content the employee is permitted to access. The Knowledge Synthesizer leverages extractive and generative AI to ensure answers are precise and easy-to-consume rather than providing the entire article.
3. Live Generative Answers: When an employee asks a question related to Zoom or Microsoft Outlook, automation and internal knowledge are often not practical, as the best answer is usually already available on the internet. With Live Generative Answers, Barista can now source answers from multiple places outside of the organization, such as from live data available the internet, or from LLMs such as ChatGPT and Google Bard.
4. Barista Smart Ticketing: If help is still needed, Barista will create a Smart Ticket, automatically categorizing and routing the request to the right department internally. However, when a ticket is created, Barista utilizes the resolution notes to dynamically create knowledge, leveraging service desk agent actions to self-learn.
   

Unlocking Service Desk Automation with Generative AI and Self-Learning Capabilities

Espressive Barista offers an innovative automation framework with thousands of integrations and hundreds of out-of-box automations. Its unique capability to dynamically create automations on-the-fly is complemented by a managed service, featuring continuous proactive monitoring of the language model with automated learning. When resolving employee questions, Barista harnesses the power of generative AI to accumulate knowledge and generate dynamic articles, which are seamlessly integrated back into the Knowledge Synthesizer. This transformation turns Barista into a self-learning system, constantly identifying opportunities to prevent future issues and reduce the need for additional tickets.

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For more information on Espressive Barista request a demo here.

About Espressive

Espressive, the pioneer in automating digital workplace assistance and a 2022 Forrester New Wave Leader, redefines how employees get help by delivering exceptional employee experiences. Espressive Barista, the company’s innovative virtual support agent (VSA) platform, takes on the role of the service agent, bringing the best of human experience with the best of artificial intelligence. Leveraging a proprietary and domain-specific large language model (LLM), the Employee Language Cloud, as well as integration with generalized LLMs, Barista automates resolution of employee questions, issues, and requests with personalized experiences that result in employee adoption of 80 to 85% and reduced help desk call volume of 50% to 70%. Espressive is backed by Insight Partners, General Catalyst, and Wing Venture Capital, and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Visit www.espressive.com for more information.

Espressive Media Contact

Pam Njissang
Bhava Communications for Espressive
espressive@bhavacom.com

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