Company: IBM, Armonk, NY
Company Description: IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. IBM helps its clients capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to its clients.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Achievement in Sales Automation
 Nomination Title: Sales Insight Assistant
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes, explaining the nominated achievement since July 1, 2022, OR written answers to the questions? (Choose one)
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video. If you are submitting written answers to the questions for this category, provide them in the spaces below.
- Briefly describe the nominated organization or individual: history and past performance (up to 200 words):
Total 156 words used.
While the hype around AI and foundational models continues to grow, many organizations need help deploying AI tools across real-world environments, with only 54% moving from pilot to production ( Gartner 2022 AI Survey , Gartner, 2022). At IBM, Consulting and Technology leaders require data-driven insights to stay informed and make strategic decisions for IBM’s success. The Sales Insight Assistant is an intelligent, conversational Assistant built for IBM’s employees and leadership, provides trusted data-driven insights linking multiple data sources across the enterprise. This “talk-to-my-data” assistant takes in a user’s question in natural language, understands the question, generates the appropriate SQL query to answer that question across different IBM data sources and warehouses, and provides streamlined and summarized insights in the form of a clean report for the end user. With the power of watsonx (text2SQL, LLMs, GenAI), this chatbot enables IBM’s employees and leaders to engage with their data and receive data-driven insights in seconds instead of hours.
- Outline the nominated achievement since July 1 2022 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):
Total 232 words used.
With the inception of Insight Assistant in August 2024, this team has made tremendous gains in developing this Innovative Sales solution to its latest Release last month. With a focus on speed, the team has garnered executive sponsorship from three IBM Execs, hosted nearly 100 user interviews as part of its user-centric approach, and deployed the product live in Production for nearly 4,000 users. With a scope spanning across IBM Consulting, IBM Technology, Operations, and Finance, prioritizing development with so many interested parties was a challenge - but with support of cross-functional organizations spanning UX/UI Design, Developers (Back-end/Front-end), Data Scientists, and Product Managers, the team was able to identify and deliver on the most crucial items, leading to high user satisfaction with an NPS score greater than 20.
With Insight Assistant, everything is now at the fingertips of IBM’s leaders, without needing manually built reports. With the power of GenAI, it can interpret natural language text and convert to subsequent complex queries for fetching insights or building visualizations (e.g., bar chart, line chart, etc.) within the chat application without needing any technical expertise. Use cases include:
- Lead Prioritization
- Forecasting revenue, budget, profit and other sales metrics
- Sales win probability prediction
- Pipeline and resource management
- Periodic updates and growth (e.g. Week to Week change, quarterly insights, etc.)
- Customer Insights and Churn Prediction
- Sales calculations (e.g., win rates, gap-to-target, etc.)
- Explain why the achievement you have highlighted is unique or significant. If possible compare the achievement to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the nominee's past performance (up to 250 words):
Total 238 words used.
BUSINESS CASE: Insight Assistant leverages the power of watsonx to savings and productivity. Leveraging cutting-edge GenAI modeling techniques, this intelligent assistant enables IBMers to “talk-to-their-data” and receive data-driven insights in seconds. Since its deployment this year we have valued a business benefit saving of approximately $10M and 7,500 hours across multiple Sales and Sales Operations Support teams. These time savings and productivity gains are projected to save 150,000 hours annually, freeing up our Consulting & Sales teams to effectively use that time to drive $300M in additional value for IBM over the next 5 years.
UNIQUE: Insight Assistant is incredibly unique compared to other Sales Innovation tools in that it uses a combination of natural language understanding (NLU), Generative AI for text2SQL conversion, and visualization generation to deliver meaningful data-driven insights in seconds, answering questions like “What are the fastest growing markets in Americas by revenue split by product offering?” which is unique in the industry. It also provides an ability to fine tune the LLM it uses, which you can then tailor for a specific industries and sales organization to understand the nuances and technical jargon used by users.
SCALABILITY: Insights Assistant architecture is scalable to ingest new data, as and when needed, train the LLM to learn the data nuances and leverage the AI based text2SQL engine to produce insights. Detailed process methodology on architecture and scalability is shared in the diagram below.
- Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
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