#55 Conversational Business Applications with DRUID AI's Irina Dochitu

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. Today's episode is again one of our interview Specials, which are the, yeah, I think the most popular episodes we, we have with our audience. And yeah, usually you hear myself and Arno talking about all things process and automation. But today we have a great guest here with us who is as passionate about process and automation as we are. It is a great pleasure to welcome Irina. She is the Channel Alliance Director at Druid.ai and is on a mission to empower enterprises with the art of conversation. Hello, Irina. Thank you for joining us today.

Hello both. It's a pleasure to see you here and to be part of this conversation because I'm quite a fan of your podcast. So I was wondering when you were going to invite us as well.

So we wanted to make it very special, so we kept you waiting.

Yeah, I think so.

Tell us a bit more about you and what you're doing at Druid.ai.

Well, for me in Druid.ai, as the title speaks for itself, I am managing the partnership network because Druid.ai as a company is a partner-focused company and we are on a mission to enable our partners to promote the Druid.ai solution and to provide the services for their customers in order for their customers to benefit of the Druid solution. So this is what I'm doing. I'm friends with all the partners in the network.

Great. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, between Arno and myself, we are working with various intelligent automation vendors to support companies with all things process and automation. Where do you see the sweet spot for Druid AI in the market?

Well, Druid.ai wants to close a gap between humans and the system within their organization, especially enterprise companies, enterprise organization, because we have identified this need of the humans. And I'm talking here about both employees and also customers of that company. To— they have a need to access, access faster the information that resides in the system. So the goal of Druid is to close that gap and to provide all the tools necessary in order to facilitate to both the employees and the customers an easy access to, to the information in various systems. So actually, Druid AI is a conversational platform, a no-code platform that allows at this moment the development of what we call conversation business applications that are a step ahead of what it's usually known as chatbots. More than that, a step ahead of what it's usually known as virtual assistants. There are basically— Droid Platform is a means to create real conversation business applications.

Okay, so you're basically creating a new, a new sort of category. Category, yeah, that sounds interesting.

Very exciting. Yes, yes, yes, yes, this is— and we actually, we are working with, uh, with Gartner and the analyst in the area to help us in developing that, that new category in this conversational space that is crowded but still in need of more enterprise solutions, if I may say so.

Yeah, amazing. And now with the new investment, you can really push on that new category.

Absolutely, absolutely. We are expanding due to this new round of investment. We have already opened offices in US and UK. We also have a focus in opening an office in the APAC region. Most likely in Singapore or Japan. So yes, we have as a goal to extend globally, to extend our global presence by opening offices, but also supporting the partners in the regions.

Amazing. Great.

Yeah.

And just looking at— you talk a bit about the Gartner analyst. It looks like there's big numbers involved in the rise of AI-driven conversational automation. I'm sort of just looking at a few numbers here that's been published on your website. 7.3 billion operational cost savings from using chatbots in banking by 2023. 87% of CEOs are looking to implement chatbots in their HR departments. There's many more. 3.6 billion annual cost savings from using automations with chatbots in healthcare by 2022. Interesting one, 95% percent of customer interactions will be managed through chatbots by 2025. I mean, the list is just endless. So it's a very, very exciting space you guys are in, Irina, and I think it's, you know, from the beginning of DREDD, of course, we as a partner were involved in some of those conversations. You know, we've got an eye on chatbots, Sascha, myself, automation guys. It's a topic that's obviously been discussed a lot on our show. It's a topic that actually gets a lot of interest from our listeners because it's something new. It's a different channel to communicate, you know, with automation processes in the background. So we talk a lot about use cases because we feel use cases are a very important way to frame, you know, how these tools can actually benefit businesses. And again, we talk about HR departments and having virtual HR assistants helping. And I guess the question that I have for you, for myself, and I guess also on behalf of our listeners, is if you look sort of back in the last 12 months at Druid, what do you think was the most exciting, or I guess the most impactful use case delivered with the Druid AI platform?

Okay, a good question. Interesting, I haven't thought about it, but what comes to mind is the project that we have delivered in healthcare because this is one of the reasons why it convinced us to move towards conversational business application, the topic that I was mentioning prior, because As I told you, we started out with chatbots, what is actually understood by chatbots, just simple agents that would respond to certain questions, right? Some of them are smart enough to respond correctly, some of them are not. With Druidd, what makes them smart is the NLP engine, the natural language processing engine that we have in, we deliver in our platform. That covers 52 languages. So this is one of the reasons why our chatbots are smart. The other one is the, uh, the ability to integrate within those systems in the organization. So it's another feature that moved us from chatbots towards virtual assistants. So basically not only able to respond to questions but also perform tasks And the step ahead was in Conversational Business Application when in healthcare— and I'm going back to the impactful use case that we have delivered— we not only responded to questions, not only had the ability to route to the agents within the call center. For example, when they had— I'm talking here about healthcare, but private healthcare. We are working with one of the largest private healthcare clinics in Eastern Europe, and they, they asked of us to deliver a virtual assistant that would take the load of their call center. And the biggest load was with patients, or what they understood by customers, responding to certain questions, right? So various questions, and the virtual assistant was able to deliver that. Then the next step was the route to a human agent, so the triage part which took place, which was facilitated by the virtual assistant. So routing to the right agent in the call center, that took part of the load from the call center. And the final step was the automatic doctor's appointment, meaning that it was not the need anymore to have a human in the loop. So everything was delivered automatically by the virtual assistant. So by integrating with the CRM system, by integrating with the core system in their enterprise, the virtual assistant managed to do the doctor's appointment. So basically, this is what we understand by a business, a conversation business application. We delivered an appointment application, but in a conversational way. So I would consider this as one of the most impactful use cases that we have delivered, because after this, this project took, took life, we successfully delivered other similar projects to, to our, to our other customers.

So yeah, very exciting. And I, I must say, you know, This sort of conversational-centric way is a very convenient way for a lot of people to do business, whether or not you book an appointment. So it is just something that makes sense to implement, and if you do it right— by the sounds of it, you guys have absolutely nailed it— And you can do the sort of integration into, let's say, the patient care system to book the appointment. You can send out the reminders. It sounds like a very exciting use case for it. And obviously for patient care itself, appointment management. We in the UK, you know, I'm just thinking about the NHS. There's a lot of cost constraints on our healthcare system at the minute. So any, any bit of efficiency you can squeeze out of it is very welcomed. And I can potentially see a solution like this probably being rolled out in our local healthcare system as well in the not so distant future.

Yeah, absolutely. And imagine a similar solution for other industries as well, because Druid is industry agnostic. Even though we have a sweet spot for financial services, so I would have to mention that.

Sure.

Imagine this type of customer engagement in any other industry. So automation of the onboarding process, right? So end-to-end onboarding process, it can be done conversationally by the— facilitated by the platform or tools. So, um, so yes, this is, uh, this is the, the future, what the future awaits us. And actually what brings, uh, what brings for our customers ROI as well, because more contracts are being signed, uh, by, by, uh, by the, the virtual assistants. The, the customers are happier. And with Druid, you can also deliver an omnichannel approach because nowadays companies are looking to also provide this And Druid facilitates as well this omnichannel approach because whenever you build a virtual assistant on Druid, you can have the virtual assistant available on multiple channels. And this is very important because you open new ways, new channels to communicate with the users on the channels that actually they are very accustomed to using, like, I don't know, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, or especially the younger generation WhatsApp is something that they can't live without.

Yes.

So having a way to communicate with a certain company on WhatsApp is the preferred way.

Yeah.

Yeah, I believe we probably only surface or scratching the surface of the capabilities and what's possible with this. I think it's definitely one of those technologies that's ever evolving. I mean, you talk a bit about the omnichannel approach where you can reach people on a device that they're used to— WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger. It is just incredible that this sort of thing actually exists. And I think sometimes when we look at Druid, for example, and their, you know, AI-driven sort of conversational chatbot, there's so much power behind it. And you know, there's so many use cases, and especially when you have got pre-existing automations that already exist, this is just another thing that you could plug in and open up automation to the masses.

And there was a huge, huge shift anyways. And so I believe there's no company out there in enterprise world which is not, um, using Teams or Slack. These days, isn't it? So everything is now in these chat panels. I probably reduced my own workload, email workload, down sort of probably to 10% of what it used to be before MS Teams and Slack, which is incredible. So it just makes sense to, to put the chatbot into those conversations.

Yeah, absolutely. Imagine having a virtual assistant on Teams like you have regular colleague, but 24/7 available, that would respond to your needs to request a certificate or take a leave, ask for a leave request, or ask for certain information regarding, I don't know, work from home or any other HR-related topics. So imagine having, having this available. It will not only provide you with satisfaction as an employee, but also take a lot of load out of the shoulders of the HR department who had to do this repetitive task that they didn't bring any value to it, but took a lot of time for them to deliver. So that's really powerful. And the customers that we have that are using HR Virtual Assistant have become addicted to it, and they are really pleased to use them.

Right. You touched a bit on the future previously. So when we talk about intelligent automation, hyperautomation, and looking into that future a bit, where do you see things developing for companies in the areas of automation, hyperautomation, and maybe very particular in the area of conversational AI?

Well, going— starting with the regular automation, with the RPA processes that are already in place, and we need to leverage those automation by adding this conversational layer on top so that the automation that used to happen in the backend will be triggered by the final customers or other employees So that's part of the hyperautomation journey. So RPA plus conversational AI. And even more than that, Druid is considered as an AI hub, meaning that we are able to integrate other third-party solutions like OCR solution for extracting information from documents, document understanding, electronic signature, e-payment. So any type of solution that will be part of either an employee journey or a customer journey. Those would come together in a single solution, a conversational AI solution, so that we deliver this hyperautomation that everyone is talking about and then considering. So this is where Druid steps in and has the ability to integrate those various solutions into, into the journey dedicated to, to the users.

Amazing. So, and with all these innovative technologies available, yeah, we often get the question from our listeners. What's your advice for companies getting started with, with chat? Bots, not chatbots, because we are already evolving here in conversational AI projects.

Well, uh, they are either starting from the automation that is already in place so that it makes sense to add a conversational layer on top so that you can trigger a process and get human feedback during a process. Or just start small. Start small. Consider a process that actually takes a lot of time and there is no real value added from the owner of the chatbot, right? So a process that can be easily automated. And the real beauty of the virtual assistants is that they can learn from the experience. So basically either you start with a very, very smart virtual assistant or just one with that has the ability to respond to certain questions. It gets smarter by the usage. So we have in the platform a whole set of tools that allows the smarter to get to, that allows for the virtual assistant assistant to get smarter and smarter in an easy way. So going back to the question, you don't have to be scared that if you set up an initial scope, you won't be able to further on build on that scope. It's the exact opposite. So you can start small, see what the users are requesting or expecting from a virtual assistant, and build on top of those requests. So that would be an approach.

Okay, yeah, that sounds easy enough and very good.

Yeah, actually, actually, uh, also another way to start is from the pre-configured solutions that we offer, because having this experience in various domains, in various business processes, and in various industries. In Druid, we also have some pre-configured conversation, pre-configured functionalities that in certain cases make the life easier of, of the business owners of the virtual assistants because, uh, we are just doing a gap analysis between the processes that they already have and what we cover. And so they can start with more skilled virtual assistants.

Okay, so these are sort of just, I guess, pre-configured conversational bots that you've trained and pre-loaded with, I guess, best-of-breed responses, and these are off the shelf included in the Druid platform. And these are the ones you can literally on day one install and customize it towards your needs and for your specific requirements, which is a great way to start. I think that a lot of things— I'm Sascha, I'm thinking about HR onboarding. It's an old favorite on the podcast. It's one of the Where do I start with automation? Well, why don't you automate your onboarding process? Okay, I didn't think about that. Let's do that. It's a sort of the go-to one for the where do I start conversation. And I think obviously it sounds like the benefits of this accelerator approach really gets you kickstarted into using conversational AI with its eye to business. We would love to talk to you a lot longer, Irina, about so many things. I think for our listeners out there, we talk a lot about the, the Piper Automation space, and of course, of course, conversational AI is just one of the, the main growing pillars with inside it, and a sort of a, a very, very, you know, exciting technology to, to watch out for. Adruyd especially, Irina, I've heard about the good investment you guys have received, so it seems like this is just growing from strength to strength for you guys.

Well, yes, yes, we gain so much experience out of the projects that we deliver and also coming from our partners. So each partner has a major thing to say regarding our solution. And we very much appreciate the feedback that's coming in and try to adapt, to constantly adapt the solution to the needs we find in the market. And I think we successfully managed to do that. So in a short time, I would say.

That's a really, really incredible story, and thanks for sharing that with us. So Usually at this part of the podcast, you know, we and our listeners like to get to know our interview guests a bit more, you know, and we talk a lot about the technical side of things and the business side. But if that's okay with you, we would like to ask you a couple of quick questions just for our listeners out there to understand who you are as a person outside of Druid. Is that all right with you?

Oh yes, sure, sure.

Okay, well, I'll kick off with the first one, the old favorite. Who is your idol and why do you say that?

Well, I haven't thought about it at all, considering, considering the talk that we have today. One of the idols that I have would probably be our, our current CEO, and not because it's our current CEO, but because of the fact that he has a way with, with people and that he managed to, to keep together a team who is very loyal. Who is following him with trust. So he has my respect for that, because actually the team behind Druid comes from his former company, which he has built more than 20 years ago. So there is a core in the Druids team that has been following Liviu for 20 years now. So I think that's pretty impressive. So I will call him an idol today.

That's great. Yeah, you have built something amazing together.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely incredible.

And we'll pass the message on, maybe in your next appraisal you'll get special treatment.

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, imagine you could get all the contents and knowledge of a book instantly. Which book would you choose?

Well, the ones that— the one that I'm reading at this moment is Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and I'm really passionate about the topic that he's presenting in the book, Yuval Harari. So, uh, yeah, I would love to, to have all that knowledge about, about human, human history, because, uh, this is what helps us, help us understand not only the past but also the future. So yeah, amazing.

Well, check that one out then. Sascha, what's up? What's on your reading list at the minute?

Oh, nothing. I'm just staring at my monitor and programming. Yeah, yeah. So no, no reading at the moment.

No, the Bezos letters or anything interesting like that?

These are letters. Okay, that sounds intriguing. Are you reading that?

Uh, well, it's on the shelf. Um, I always get these books for Christmas and I never— I always promise myself to read them when I'm on holiday, but it never happens. So, uh, but yeah, I'm, I'm reading actually quite interesting book at the minute about, um where we as humans, why we live in homes that look like homes. Why do we have a dining room? Why do we have a sitting room? It's a book by Bill Bryson. Sorry, it's a bit off topic here, but he talks a lot about the evolution of our homes because everybody obviously works from home these days. And I thought, well, why does homes Why are they configured the way they are? So he answers a lot of my questions. I'll pass that one to you, Sascha.

Yeah, very interesting. Now I'm hooked.

Yeah.

Okay. I'll move on to the next question, Irina, if that's okay. So what's the best advice you've ever received from somebody?

Oh, well, from actually from one of my former CEOs. I was like 27-something, yeah, and I used to work in media selling publicity in media, and somehow they called me to an interview. The former company I used to work was for a partner of SAP in Romania, one of the largest partners of SAP, and he pitched SAP to me. He said that this is one of the biggest trains that you'll ever jump in, and this is the time for you because you are quite old by now, me being 27. So, and he said you should get on this train because IT is a great train, so jump in and then do the marketing for us. So I did. So, uh, because actually this is what led me here at this point. So yeah, I think that would be one of the best advice that I have ever received, to get on the, on the train at that age.

Brilliant. Yeah, that's a nice story.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Sascha, do you want to do the last one?

Yeah, so our last one is, uh, is if you could be an Olympic athlete what sport would you choose?

Volleyball, without a doubt.

Okay, that was any good.

I used to— yeah, actually, I used to play volleyball for 10 years, and I was a junior champion and a national champion for 3 years. So even though I'm not that tall at all, and this is why I was— I remained at the junior level, but nevertheless, volleyball was one of the, the loves of my life. So without a doubt. Volleyball would be the sport I would pick.

And do you find time these days to—

No, not at all.

No. So we need more robots to free up your time.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm building one myself, actually.

I can imagine. I can imagine you probably are going to build a lot of robots.

Yeah.

In your life. But that's interesting. So you, you, you— so you don't have to be tall to be a good volleyball player. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, the role I was playing on didn't have the need to have a tall person that tall, so I managed to play for a while, but it stopped when I had to go pro.

So yes, okay, I never knew that about volleyball, so thanks for sharing that useful tip. I shall remember that for till the end of my days. I've got no more questions for you. I think you've been a wonderful guest. Thank you very much.

It was a real pleasure to have you on the, on the podcast. And before we end the, the recording, what would you say to your listeners or to our listeners how they can reach out to you? The best, and what would the best way to get in touch?

By talking to you guys.

Okay, talking to us, okay, or reach out.

Reaching out to you.

Okay, that's good.

Nevertheless, yeah, we can— I can share my email address, my contacts. You can find me on LinkedIn.

Okay.

Irina Dokhitsu. So yes, please reach out to me if you have any questions regarding Druid, and not only, maybe volleyball as well.

Yeah, right. Please do reach We'll put all that into the show notes and then, uh, yeah, everyone can reach out.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, thank you very much again. Uh, it was a pleasure to have you on the show, and maybe we do another, another episode with you in the future.

For— yeah, for me as well, it would be great. So I enjoyed it very much. Thank you for having me here.

Unfortunately, that's it again with this episode of the Process in Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it!

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