Accelerating Value Delivery by Augmenting Application Support with NLP (Chatbots)

Software Engineering teams, that are scrum based, are often responsible to address user questions in a tiered manner. While lower tiers are addressed through dedicated operations and support teams, higher tier user questions, deemed more complex, often pull engineers and architects away from regular scrum-based work. Teams respond to such requests by allocating a fixed percentage of their time for such needs. In a pilot study, we identified that 10%-30% of a team’s time is allocated for such activities. Considering the relatively high percentage of time spent on such activities, we turned to AI and adopted an NLP based approach to address certain user queries through chatbots. In 2019, we leveraged our partnership with AWS and built a custom resource that can now be leveraged by different engineering teams to reduce the time spent on user support. By adopting NLP based user support, we can unlock valuable time for our development teams, so that they can focus on higher value features and accelerate solution delivery velocity. In this talk, I will describe the technical andbusiness-related challenges in developing such innovations and how we successfully overcame many of them.

Arvind delivers business value through digital strategy and organizational leadership. He brings a combination of centered leadership, technical expertise and solid business fundamentals. He is a lifelong learner and is passionate about innovative technologies and their positive impact on people & organizations. He has hands on experience building and leading several capabilities for R&D using blockchain, AR/VR, IOT and ML.