Black & Veatch, an employee-owned, global leader in building critical human infrastructure in energy, water, telecommunications, and government services, is on a journey to leverage AI-assisted bots, called virtual experts, to better capture and interact with engineering knowledge and standards. The goal of this emerging effort is to experiment with ways to better capture knowledge and expertise within the company. Ultimately, this initiative would lead to a reduced amount of time required to locate desired information and create an opportunity for continued innovation to better support the future.

The Problem Knowledge and standards were generally captured in written form, which led to an abundance of Microsoft Word documents that were difficult to search and a burden to continually refresh. Up to this point, access to content was through best practice document and folder organization and traditional search functions. In addition, it was a difficult challenge to obtain feedback on the type of knowledge professionals were seeking or if they found it. The Solution Black & Veatch began working with AI technology and passed these engineering documents through a natural language processing scan to identify topics eventually stored in a knowledge ontology that would be leveraged in real-time chats initially to answer specific questions for engineers working on a substantial number of projects. The company has a team of 30 digital assistants online today that are being rolled out for general use. The professionals who have been engaged so far are pleased with the results and optimistic about the impact of the technology. While there are no hard metrics, the comments have included positive developments such as reduced searching, better feedback on dated content and engaged knowledge sharing. For the first time, Black & Veatch now has visibility to the actual use and usefulness of the content with various dashboards captured by monitoring the traffic on the bots.

The Future

Black & Veatch expects to continue to expand its knowledge sharing to include more topics if the success continues with the current pilot. In addition, the company expects the content will become more diverse to include voice, video and image content. These can be used for equipment installation and maintenance training in the future as well.

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Jim Sinur

Jim Sinur is an independent thought leader in applying Digital Business Platforms (DBP), Customer Experience/Journeys (CJM), Business Process Management (BPM), Automation (RPA), Low-code and Decision Management at the edge to business outcomes. His research and areas of personal experience focus on intelligent business processes, business modeling, business process management technologies, process collaboration for knowledge workers, process intelligence/optimization, AI applied to business policy/rule management, IoT and leveraging business applications in processes. Jim is also one of the authors of BPM: The Next Wave. His latest book is Digital Transformation. Innovate or Die Slowly. Jim is also a well know digital and traditional artist.

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