As businesses navigate an increasingly digital world, the ability to harness AI has become a defining factor for innovation and growth.
Generative AI empowers organizations to leverage state-of-the-art language models to transform operations, improve decisionmaking, and enhance customer experiences. From streamlining workflows to enabling data-driven insights, companies across industries are finding value in adopting AI to drive efficiencies and unlock new possibilities.
Let’s take a closer look at a couple of examples from across Europe.
First, we have the National Bank of Greece, which was constrained by a rule-based optical character recognition system that only supported PDFs, making document processing cumbersome, inefficient, and difficult to scale. This system was ill-equipped to handle the bank’s variety and volume of documents.
Using Azure AI Content Understanding, the bank built a scanning solution that supports twenty different document types and can recognize the Greek language. This enabled rapid model deployment and extensive integration with bank systems.
By integrating AI into their operations, companies are not just optimizing processes but redefining how they deliver value in a competitive landscape
Processing 700,000 documents each month, the bank’s accuracy in document processing increased from 60% to approximately 85%, enabling more digital and paperless customer journeys, reducing waiting times, and supporting real-time decisionmaking.
A second story comes from Laerdal Medical, a health provider in Norway, which in 2021 used voice actors to develop a virtual training simulation for nursing students. The time-consuming recording process limited the use cases of the training program and was an inefficient use of medical experts’ time.
Using Azure AI Text to Speech custom and neural voices, Laerdal created material for its training programs, developing voices in different languages, accents, and states of health to better reflect diverse backgrounds.
They were able to reduce costs and develop pediatric, maternity, and nursing fundamentals modules much faster. Specifically, they reduced the time spent creating virtual patient and nurse voices from two months to less than 24 hours.
Our third and last story comes from Vodafone in the UK, which explored innovative ways to handle complex customer inquiries more efficiently and ensure timely and personalized responses. Using Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Studio, Copilot, and Azure AI Search, the company enhanced its customer-facing chatbot and developed a conversational AI search interface to help agents answer complex inquiries.
Since deploying these two powerful generative AI solutions—TOBi and SuperAgent—Vodafone has seen its customer satisfaction scores go up, which bodes well for the company as it maps a rollout of the two solutions to additional call centers in multiple countries.
The potential of AI is boundless and is enabling organizations to tap into this transformative power with ease and scalability. By integrating AI into their operations, companies are not just optimizing processes but redefining how they deliver value in a competitive landscape. As success stories continue to emerge, AI stands at the forefront of this revolution, helping businesses innovate, adapt, and thrive.
