Artificial Intelligence (AI) is hot topic and organizations across every industry are looking for ways to successfully integrate it into their business. The benefits of AI for businesses include increased efficiency through automation, enhanced decision making with data, improved customer experiences through personalized interactions, and the ability to uncover valuable insights from large datasets that would be impossible for humans to manually analyze. Additionally, AI can enable businesses to identify market trends, optimize processes, and continue fostering innovation. Companies understand that they need to embrace AI or be left behind, although most don’t know how to begin.

3Cloud’s generative AI assessment helps businesses to identify their starting point with AI through a phased progression of education, ideation, and proof of value to achieve scale across the business. This blog walks through a construction architecture and engineering firm’s AI assessment engagement with 3Cloud.

AI Roadmap Engagement

The client partnered with 3Cloud to collaborate and perform an AI Roadmap engagement, aiming to leverage the potential of artificial intelligence within their organization. Throughout the assessment, several key objectives were identified and prioritized. These included determining whether to build or buy generative AI solutions, outlining a high-level AI architecture framework with considerations for maintenance, devising strategies for efficient retrieval and prompt-engineering, improving the accuracy of Q&A systems over arbitrarily large knowledge bases, and evaluating and assessing various Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures.

Existing Capabilities and Restraints

In assessing the existing capabilities of the organization, their constraints became apparent, particularly regarding the limited number of Enterprise Technology Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), which restricts comprehensive support across various technical domains. Also, the cost-prohibitive nature of fully staffing the Service Desk poses a challenge, necessitating a more efficient allocation of resources. A third constraint was the difficulty in managing knowledge for large-scale construction projects.

Transitioning to the desired state involves implementing GenAI solutions such as a “Chat with an IT Architect” feature to streamline access to expert guidance, augmenting Service Desk staff with AI to handle routine inquiries and refocus roles on advanced triage, and establishing a solution to make the project knowledge accessible to all participants within seconds. These initiatives aim to enhance operational efficiency, optimize resource utilization, and improve collaboration across the organization.

Use Case: Chat with an IT Architect

The primary use case identified was to create an AI solution to “Chat with an IT Architect”. The goal was to ensure a cohesive data strategy for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) across multiple knowledge bases (KBs). Architecting and budgeting for this use case would involve allocating resources to key components such as data storage and transformations, a modern data platform, reporting and BI tools, and document cracking technologies.

When considering the architecture and management of data for this use case, several factors come into play. Firstly, data governance practices are essential to ensure organized indexing of data types for efficient retrieval, segmentation and categorization. Next, maintaining high data quality is crucial, following the principle of GIGO (garbage-in, garbage-out). Thirdly, implementing data version control tools enables tracking changes and ensuring data freshness, particularly vital for knowledge base updates. Lastly, unified orchestration of data workflows and pipelines ensures  efficiency and effectiveness in leveraging data for AI-driven insights.

Use Case: Augment Service Desk

The other use case identified was to augment Service Desk staff with AI that can engage customers. When managing data for AI applications, several key considerations should be kept in mind. In this case, implementing data version control to track changes and iterations in data sources, ensuring accurate QA to maintain consistency, i.e., similar ticket resolutions or the latest updates. Next, establishing clear governance policies is crucial for ensuring data integrity, privacy, and compliance. Last, addressing multi-modality challenges by handling various data types such as text, images, etc., that may complicate data pre-processing but can greatly improve groundedness. 

How will the Listing Augmentation use-case impact the bottom line?

By advancing the construction company’s AI journey and executing the identified use cases, the business will see significant impacts:

  • Go from 5 to unlimited SMEs available to answer questions
  • Annual labor savings of over $400K with more than 2,500 hours saved per year
  • Q&A cost grows linearly, not exponentially
  • GenAI pattern that scales/replicates easily to other use cases
  • Business will see ROI within 6 months
  • Plus, more improvements that haven’t yet been quantified

Generative AI Roadmap

3Cloud’s generative AI roadmap empowers you to build with GenAI, scale into a modern platform, and emerge as an industry frontrunner. Collaborating closely with your enterprise, 3Cloud will pinpoint the most strategic targets or use cases to explore using GenAI. Prioritized GenAI projects will focus on refining proofs-of-value to harness the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). 3Cloud will help you develop intelligent applications where we’ll weave GenAI into your apps to bake ‘human-level’ intelligence into your business. A crucial aspect of successful AI integration lies in adopting a Modern Data Platform. This modernized framework will optimize data utilization and extract maximum value from your data and intellectual property (IP). By embracing AI, you’ll demonstrate your leadership within the industry and your commitment to pioneering innovation.

The Path Forward

If your organization is ready to begin the journey to become an AI-enabled enterprise, 3Cloud has the experience and expertise to guide you every step of the way. Starting with a Generative AI Roadmap, we’ll partner with you to decide on the best single use case to guide the Statement of Work (SOW) and begin the process to scope that use case. An important factor to the success of incorporating AI-based systems is that organizations must first assess their AI maturity, both from a technology and culture perspective. 

See other use cases: AI saves 89,000 man hours and AI minimizes scheduling gaps.

Another important aspect of AI is data. Data plays a critical role in the success of any business, serving as the foundation for informed decision-making, strategic planning, and operational efficiency. At 3Cloud, we understand the importance of data to your business’s success. Our framework leverages key aspects of industry best practice to provide our clients with an agile path to enterprise data strategy and aligns your data strategy with the prioritized GenAI use case.

Engage with 3Cloud to align your data strategy with your Generative AI use-case.