Re-shape your delivery model utilizing AI with Oracle Digital Assistant

Looking to improve both user experience and productivity? Oracle Digital Assistant may be the right answer for you. Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) is a powerful tool that enhances communication and productivity within organizations. It acts as a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) support system, providing seamless guidance to employees across various industries. Baker Tilly, an Oracle PartnerNetwork Member, has helped organizations like property management company, Equity Residential, leverage ODA to adapt to business growth.

Equity is a long-standing customer of both Baker Tilly and Oracle and has used many of Oracle’s products over the years. In 2023, they implemented Help Desk and Oracle Digital Assistant to automate repetitive tasks and offer support for Human Resources (HR) inquiries.

Baker Tilly Project Manager, Ben Penick, along with Equity Residential HR Centralized Business Operations (CBO) Manager, Liz Forker and Equity Residential HR CBO Representative, Samantha Kopczyk, presented on a recent Customer Connect session to highlight Equity’s ongoing success with the ODA.

Project planning and implementation

What was the motivation to broaden the use of Oracle Digital Assistant? How did you decide on the use cases you targeted for this implementation?

Forker: Equity has long wanted to move towards a self-service model. The larger HR team and our workforce sit in four different time zones, so we are not always available to help answer questions when they’re at work. We had previously rolled out the ODA for recruiting and knew that it could be further utilized to improve the user experience. As it currently stands, the CBO team handles all types of requests from employees.

Previously, the CBO was handling most of those requests via email or instant message (IM), as opposed to utilizing a ticketing system such as Oracle Help Desk. The true motivation for this entire project was to move the team away from email- and IM-based communication to a help desk which would allow for better tracking and reporting on requests. In addition, the CBO wanted to expand employee self-service capabilities to reduce the number of basic interactions that employees had with CBO and wider HR team.

To do this, we targeted a parallel rollout of HR Help Desk and various ODA skills. The digital assistant is the first line of defense for all user inquiries and, if an issue requires human intervention, the user is prompted to open a Help Desk ticket through the ODA. Because of this, we often refer to the two as one and the same within Equity.