IBM India & Tech Mahindra: Partners in Telco Innovation

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In Conversation with Tech Mahindra
With the Right partnership at the Right time, you can put Smart to Work.

Watch Mukund Kannan, VP & Global Competency Head For Artificial Intelligence, Tech Mahindra, and Kapil Mehta, Cloud Technical Sales Leader, India/ South Asia, IBM highlight why IBM is Tech Mahindra’s partner of choice to work on Watson based chatbot to find connected solutions in an inter-connected world.
https://ibm.co/2C7G8qS

In Conversation with Tech Mahindra

How have IBM services helped improve your business?

In the connected world we live in, the most important technology infrastructure that we count on to carry on our lives is TelCo. When your TelCo company actually has a problem, it affects your life more than you can imagine.

One of our clients was recently going through an end-to-end business operation process transformation, and one of the main items that they wanted to address was the ERP transformation. To address the issue of rolling out such a large transformation, we introduced a Watson-based chat bot. Our client had a few queries about the idea, so we walked them through the various options that we had, and Watson came out on top.

Our client was very excited about how the solution was turning out, but there were still some concerns we needed to address. We wanted someone with credibility to convince our client and having known and worked with IBM for a quite a while, it made sense for us to work together.

Both IBM and Tech Mahindra walked the customer through the IBM cloud architecture, which addressed their concerns on what data needs to flow into the cloud and what it does. Both IBM and Tech Mahindra gave a massive value-add for the customer.

How are you using AI to leverage data to make more personalized offerings?

When we first set up the chat bot we expected people to ask business related questions, but we started to notice that people were also asking unrelated questions, such as ‘where can I get a coffee?’ and ‘are you a Russian spy?’ We found these examples funny and wanted to make use of that. We let the users ask these types of questions and eventually they moved on to more business-related questions. I think they saw a human touch and this became one of the best pieces of innovation that both our teams did in order to try and move this along.

Our client was thrilled to see the usage metrics. During the first week, it was 1,500, then 4,000 in the second week, and it continued to climb.

I put it down to three main points. First is the experience that both our organisations have while rolling out these solutions. Second is the robustness of our technology and the Watson APIs that we have, which allowed us to meet the business outcomes. And third is the skill level of our team in being ale to handle systems like AI. Our client was so impresses by this implementation that it even served as a benchmark for them, going so far as to appear in newspapers.
It’s good to see these types of rollouts adding real business value. Our own account teams have contacted us saying they want to take this to their customers, and the customers are asking for this function as well.