Meet KATE, your digital personal assistant. She is available 24/7. You can ask anything regarding policies and processes. And she is reachable across multiple channels. She will assist your employees and allow them to save hours, previously lost on looking for appropriate answers.

What is a digital assistant? An application for a website, mobile app, or device that interacts with its user in a similar manner as an actual person through spoken or written language. It responds by providing the requested information or accomplishing a requested task. Often, (cognitive) intelligence is added to make your assistant seem more human-like and provide superior user experience. Think: identifying emotions in peoples’ faces, detecting sentiment while processing natural language, or searching for relevant information that makes your life easier.

Digital assistants can take on simple functions that eat up time, which allows you to focus on complex, value-adding tasks.

Large, mature organizations can have an incredible amount of policies and processes available. It is normal that your employees have questions around these policies and their practicalities, especially new policies. Finding the correct answer to your question can be a very time consuming quest.

What if real time answers to these questions were available every hour of the day, every day of the week, and above all: didn’t consume anyone’s time.

Let’s assume searching for this information takes on average 15 minutes.

Let’s assume this happens 20 times a year on average. For a new joiner, these questions are a lot more frequent, however policies change and even the most seasoned employee has to search for information sometimes.

If your company has more than 1.000 employees, then we can estimate they spend over 5.000 hours or 650 men days looking for answers to questions about company policies or procedures.

For starters, KATE can help you with basic questions with regards to information found on the intranet (onboarding website, IT policies, HR policies …). These botomated (bot + automated) question and answer sessions can evolve into human like interactions and interventions using cognitive technologies.

Cognitive intelligence is a major disruption and implies substantial opportunities. KATE will help you leverage this opportunity. She will be able to understand, reason and learn. In this way, KATE knows who she is conversing with and will fetch user specific content to help you with personalized questions that are not available on intranet and need a personalized answer (tell you the number of holidays you have left, list your current expenses, show the projects that went over budget, ...). Moreover, KATE can assist you in more advanced activities such as filling in timesheets, booking meeting rooms, finding and storing documents and more. KATE will not deliver the best answer, she will choose the right answer. Based on the nuances in the natural language, the context of the question and what she learned from previous answers, she is able to provide different answers to the same question: the answer to ‘Which terminal should I use?” will depend on whether you are at the airport or at home, installing new devices.

For the long term approach, a clear roadmap, data governance and data architecture are necessary, which will require cross-departmental collaboration.

For end users (your employees)

• Your employees will save a lot of time when looking for the right answer
• Your employees can choose their preferred communication channel, which is available anywhere at anytime
• Your employees have trust and control of their data
• Employees can receive a personalized answer to their question, rather than relying on a standard FAQ, for example.

For your business

• Broad access to your employees, new ways to delight and serve them via your own web site or app or in any number of popular messaging experiences
• Reduced cost of looking for information
• Enhanced productivity through task automation and letting employees focus on complex or high-value tasks
• Reach employees anywhere and anytime

• We offer an integrated approach. KPMG has seamlessly integrated its technology & analytics capabilities into its consulting practice and can leverage the full range of KPMG’s in-depth experience on topics ranging from strategy and operating models to lean, agile and sourcing practices.
• We bring proven frameworks and reference architectures that can be used to accelerate and check completeness of the solution.
• We have the technical expertise. KPMG’s established expertise in advanced technologies helps customers to develop tailored technology solutions. KPMG’s alliance with Microsoft allows customers’ tailored solutions to be built on the certified Microsoft Azure platform. KPMG has also an extensive knowledge of Open Source solutions and has built its own D&A platform (KAVE and ESKAPADE).
• We implement enterprise-wide data privacy and identify and achieve data protection needs. 
• In offering you an end-to-end solution, our team of experts always works closely with you to help design a strategy and approach that is unique to your company and needs.

Of course, KATE is more broadly skilled than helping your employees in finding answers and fulfilling tasks. KATE can also assist you in:

• Improving customer interactions. Let KATE take care of regular customer questions, so that your employees can focus on complicated customer issues that require human intervention. She can be your assistant that ensures that customers find all information and products that they are looking for, help customers in updating their account information and many more. In that way, you can offer superior customer services at lower operational cost.
• Extending your product offering. Jump on the technology trends train and embed personal assistants in your product offering. Self-driving cars, automated homes, smart living aids etc. all make use of digital assistants such as KATE.
• Improving internal processes. Let KATE monitor internal and external data flows and take over low complexity tasks. In that way, she can warn you that you’re running out of supplies and place a reorder automatically, allow her to closely monitor market fluctuations and suggest you in your dynamic pricing strategies.

KATE could become your reliable virtual agent. Having a human appearance, combined with cognitive intelligence, she lends automated interactions a semblance of a personal service. Infused with cognitive intelligence, she will be able to bridge the gap between expert knowledge and customer expectation, delivering a truly personalized customer experience.