Abbott launches AI-based personal assistant Maya

Abbott, in association with SmartBots AI, has launched an innovative new virtual assistant to support and engage their pan-India sales force — Maya. As a global healthcare company, Abbott has taken a leadership role in implementing digital solutions across all stakeholders, including patients, doctors and employees, through the adoption of integrated technology solutions.

In early 2018, Abbott became first in the Indian Pharmaceutical Industry to deploy an AI assistant for its field force. Abbott’s pharmaceuticals division initiated a pilot by getting around 3,000 sales employees to start engaging with Maya for their day-to-day queries.

Maya acts as a personal assistant to the employee, providing sales operations support and keeping them ready for the day, providing access to contextual information at their fingertips. She is their virtual assistant while they are in the field meeting doctors. With Maya handling the nitty-gritties of querying and fetching information from enterprise applications, an employee can focus on the crucial aspects of his role and leave the spadework to Maya.

Developed by SmartBots AI and powered by Amazon’s LeX technology, Maya uses a voice or chat interface to communicate with employees in simple language, and provides them the assistance they need. She acts as a facilitator, helping employees to tap into an enterprise knowledge base (like SalesForce or Tableau) through familiar, easy-to-use communication channels.

Since its launch, Maya has addressed close to 12,000 queries. Currently, 32 per cent of the monthly queries raised by Abbott reps are now being answered by Maya with a 74 per cent success rate. Medical representatives can also check their execution parameters, expense reimbursement status, plan for the day and leave balance on Maya leading to increased satisfaction. And, 69 per cent of the field force rate Maya as helpful.

Having tested Maya’s capabilities with the sales team, Abbott has deployed this virtual assistant to more than 8,000 employees and plans to use the SmartBots AI platform to build bots for several other departments too.

“While Maya started as a chatbot answering redundant questions, over a period of time, its scope grew. With integration across enterprise systems and self-learning (machine learning) from usage, Maya makes it simple for the field force to access critical business insights,” says Deepak Chembath, Director — Business Effectiveness, Abbott India.

He adds, “With most commercial chatbots, failures are not handled well, but with Maya, any unanswered query gets logged as a ticket with our employee helpdesk. The unique differentiator is that Maya gets continuously trained on failed questions and is able to answer such questions going forward, thus making it an intuitive technology.”

Narsimha Rao Polisetty, Founder, SmartBots, says, “We designed Maya to evolve with every single conversation. She has supervised machine learning capabilities that help flag any unexpected behaviour. Our objective is to provide a platform where companies can build and manage their own bots, depending on their employees’ specific needs. We can deploy bots across multiple channels, like Skype or Alexa, and these can be used by anyone who wants business insights right on his/her fingertips.”