Custom GenAI Platform Boosts ABB Drives’ Productivity

Business challenge

With markets being more global and fast-paced than ever, ABB Drives set out to increase the efficiency of its organization. Upon conducting rounds of internal discussions, the company decided to implement an AI-based solution that would support team members in their daily work, enable a connection with multiple knowledge bases, and feature a chat interface. The solution would be seamlessly integrated with ABB Drives’ systems and use corporate data while running within ABB Drives’ premises.

As ABB has collaborated with Tietoevry on various projects for over 20 years, ABB Drives chose Tietoevry Create as a partner on this journey. Our client needed a single reusable framework, rather than several separate solutions that address specific challenges. Our GenAI accelerator framework, GPT for Business, matched ABB Drives’ needs and helped jumpstart the project.

We were seeking an enterprise-ready GenAI accelerator that we can fine-tune according to our needs and further develop.

— John Mathews, IS Architect, ABB Drives 

Solution & business value

Considering the size of the organization and the large number of teams within the Drives Products and System Drives units, ABB Drives was looking for a more generally applicable GenAI solution that can be used by and benefit many users. Suiting these requirements, our GPT for Business accelerator was selected for the project - a quick-to-deploy AI framework that offers a connection to the company’s own data and applications.

ABB Drives finds the GenAI platform provided by Tietoevry Create beneficial for the everyday work of its teams:

• Quick turnaround: The use of a ready-made accelerator as a basis for the GenAI platform helped reduce the time for deployment considerably. Skipping the development stage, ABB Drives saved months and only engaged in the configuration of the framework to best meet the needs of the internal teams.
• Wide application: The platform is not specific to a team within the Drives Products and System Drives division but can be applied across the whole organization. Meanwhile, the teams focus on a single solution, and as improvements are made, all teams benefit from them.
• Data findability: Users chat over different internal data sources and find the information they need faster compared to a text-based search tool.
• Configuration: The platform is designed in such a way that ABB Drives can use it partly on their own, without much intervention from the outside.

What we are expecting eventually is a high-quality chat response that is valued by the users and various relevant content being served. With the framework, we have a structured way to apply the improvements to all the onboarded use cases.

— John Mathews, IS Architect, ABB Drives

Technical details

GPT for Business allows for secure interaction with AI models and access to additional knowledge stored on SharePoint. The solution is highly customizable, in terms of UI and functionality, and offers a foundation for further, business-specific development. It can be extended to include translation services, scanned documents, and a source preview. Based on Microsoft Azure, the platform can be scaled from test groups to several thousand users.

We created several chat modes, or agents, that use ABB Drives data to solve various use cases. The platform allows multiple teams, such as R&D, Supply Chain, Marketing, etc., to chat over internal knowledge bases and find the data they need very fast.

The amount of corporate data accumulated in the company’s SharePoint pages or Confluence is massive, and the solution helps users look for information – faster than a regular text-based search would. It enables them, for example, to search through large documents containing a lot of technical details like product manuals.

Additionally, we provided the GPTStoryTeller tool that can be used to create success stories semi-automized.

Together with our team, ABB Drives is constantly expanding the solution and has included further improvements in its AI roadmap. For example, now, users can only deal with text content, but ABB Drives’ documents contain lots of infographics and images as well, and this type of content should also be incorporated into the platform. Besides, the company wants to add other knowledge bases, Confluence pages, and even repositories that are available for public use.