It provides employees with a more personalized and contextual experience for answering questions, finding information, and performing tasks. It also eliminates the complexity of deploying a chatbot because it features a no-code interface for training the chatbot to respond to employees’ questions.

With 80% of businesses expected to have some sort of chatbot automation by 2020, the Workgrid chatbot exemplifies the utility a conversational interface can provide to organizations. Available through a mobile device or web application, the Workgrid is available 24/7 to answer employee questions, provide links to relevant documents, and automate common tasks and requests.

It also uses the wealth of information organizations have about their employees to provide personalized responses that are tailored to individual employees based on their job, function, primary office location, and more.

"Employees expect workplace technology to offer a consumer-like experience," said Gillian McCann, Co-Founder, Head of Cloud Engineering & AI at Workgrid Software, and AWS Machine Learning Hero.

"This is a major step in that direction. In addition to increasing productivity and reducing costs in high-volume use cases such as help desks, the no-code interface makes the power of chatbot technology accessible to organizations that might not otherwise have the expertise on hand to deploy such an initiative. Having a chatbot like this is an important step forward and one that will only grow in value and usefulness over time."

Product features include

• Question and Answer Builder – a no-code, intuitive interface that enables organizations to rapidly deploy an employee-facing chatbot. The chatbot Q&A provides a simple and easy interface for training a chatbot (adding questions and answers).
• Small Talk – The Workgrid chatbot comes prebuilt with a collection of “Small Talk” interactions. These interactions enhance the user experience by enabling the bot to react to requests not related to other areas of the chatbot functionality, but common conversational elements such as greetings and joke requests.
• Discoverability – This is built-in dynamic support to help end users understand what is possible with the chatbot, such as what type of questions the end user can ask.
• Audience-Targeted Responses – Answers can be customized based on user attributes such as the end user’s location, state, country, manager, or other attributes available in an employee’s user profile.
• Permissions – This offers granular control of who can view, add, edit, questions, and answers. Users also have access to other features such as analytics.

The Workgrid chatbot was built using Amazon Lex technology.