Almost a year ago, at Esferize, we set out to explore artificial intelligence as a working tool for our day-to-day work; back then it was all a bit confusing, because, although we don’t remember it due to the exponential speed at which the entire AI ecosystem is evolving, a year ago everything was perhaps not as clear as it may be today.
Our company is very multidisciplinary; it covers from the world of installation and cabling to the development of our own applications, passing through operation, support, hosting and of course all the transversal activities that are necessary for the machine to work: management, marketing, the commercial side, administration, HR…
In this context, it was a bit uncertain how to design a simple tool that could be useful to all disciplines in the company, because, in addition to being a test environment that would allow us to learn new technologies, we wanted it to become part of the day-to-day work of all employees.
But if there was one thing that obsessed us from the beginning, it was the confidentiality of the information: we began to hear cases of employees who, using personal accounts on LLM platforms, uploaded information from their companies and this information became part of the neural network of the LLM and, therefore, of everyone who used it; we didn’t want that to happen to us.
With all of the above in mind, we decided to use the private implementation of OpenAI that Microsoft made available to its users: Azure AI. With this, we designed a conversational artificial intelligence environment that we called Esfi, and whose name has now become part of the corporate culture at Esferize.
Esfi has been able to listen to its colleagues in the company and nowadays it makes it possible to do useful things for its users in a very natural way; its implementation revolves around three fundamental axes:
- A conversational chat accessible to all employees but private to each employee. As the environment resides in Azure AI, there is a certain guarantee that the information provided will not become part of environments shared with other tenants (companies).
- An Expert environment, which are conversational chats specialising in user-defined topics that are provided with documentation specific to that area of expertise; these experts can also be shared with other colleagues in the company, thus having immediate access to an AI that knows about a specific topic and is continuously learning about the topic in which it has specialised.
- And an Extensions environment, which allows external systems to be easily connected through a REST API from which information not known by the LLM or by the documentation provided by the user can be obtained.
But we don’t stop there; since the beginning of this year, Esfi, in addition to all of the above, has evolved to have capabilities as an AI agent within the Employee Portal that we use on a daily basis for routine tasks, such as booking tables, clocking in, requesting holidays or consulting various information, such as sick leave protocols, sexual harassment and any other issue related to the functioning of the company.
As a chatbot in our Employee Portal, Esfi Employee answers our queries and performs actions in a light-hearted tone that characterises the spirit of the spherizers.
If the measure of a product’s success, however internal, can be based on its lost profit measured by what would happen if it disappeared, Esfi has been a success within Esferize; if it were to go offline, suddenly many of the processes we have automated would be ‘pedestrian’ without Esferize’s AI.
It is difficult to list all the things that can be done with Esfi, because the imagination of the spherizers is the limit, but today numerous experts have been created by our support and engineering colleagues, which allows them to chat with the documentation and save considerable time in research.
Our commercial colleagues use Esfi on a daily basis to make offers, translating them into different languages, analysing any legal vulnerabilities and, in conclusion, making sure that the offer is as perfect as possible. In the area of administration, assistance with contract processes and their research and comparison is a promising process that will undoubtedly revolutionise the way they work in the near future.
And, of course, our development and systems colleagues have made it an indispensable tool for code development, bug fixing, functionality research… many hours are saved on Internet searches.
But even the spherizers who were farthest away from the use of AI, our installers and on-site support technicians, already have their collections of experts with information on devices to repair and install.
And finally, the arrival of Esfi Employee has also given a boost to conversational intelligence, allowing us to very simply make a table reservation or clock in each day of our working day.
Undoubtedly, artificial intelligence is here to stay, but not only in our personal lives, but also in the corporate environment, where Esfi is gaining day by day the relevant role that AI will inevitably have in the near future in all aspects of our lives.
At Esferize, in an attempt to honour the company’s motto, Passion for innovation, we wanted to be at the beginning of the birth of generalist artificial intelligence.
