Asker kommune Enhances Employee Support with Conversational AI

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Asker kommune, a Norwegian municipality with over 6,500 public sector employees, was in search of a digital solution to facilitate the transition after merging with the Hurum and Røyken districts in 2020. The municipality needed a central repository of information that was both easy to access and use for its employees. The challenge was to provide a platform that could answer a wide range of questions related to the merger and other work-related topics, and to do so in a manner that was clear, consistent, and easily understandable by the employees. The solution also needed to be able to make better use of existing information sources within the municipality and provide a common framework of answers to be shared between municipalities.

Asker kommune is a Norwegian municipality located to the south west of Oslo. It merged with the Hurum and Røyken districts in 2020 and is home to more than 90,000 inhabitants. The municipality employs over 6,500 public sector employees and was in need of a digital solution to help ease the transition after the merger. The solution needed to provide a central repository of information for its employees that was both easy to access and use. The municipality was also looking for a way to make better use of existing information sources and provide a common framework of answers to be shared between municipalities.

The solution came in the form of a unique implementation of boost.ai’s multi-city conversational AI platform, Kommune-Kari. Developed in partnership with Sem & Stenersen Prokom, Kommune-Kari uses boost.ai’s market-leading Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to build and deploy an AI-powered virtual agent that draws from a knowledge base of over 6,000 public-sector-related topics and answers. The platform was rebranded as Tore på kontoret (or ‘Tore at the office’, in English) and trained to answer questions specific to internal employee support. Tore was designed to present answers in a clear and consistent manner, make better use of existing information sources within a given municipality, and provide a common framework of answers to be shared between municipalities. The municipality formed a project group to train and maintain Tore, using conversation data and analytics from the boost.ai platform to improve the virtual agent’s knowledge over time.

• The implementation of Tore på kontoret has led to high levels of employee satisfaction. The virtual agent’s built-in feedback system has consistently received positive scores from employees for more than 42 consecutive weeks, demonstrating that an always-available digital colleague is a net-positive to the municipality and its employee base. The project group formed to train and maintain Tore meets often to review chat logs and the answer database, using conversation data and analytics from the boost.ai platform to improve the virtual agent’s knowledge over time. This hands-on approach to internal support automation has proven to be effective in enhancing the support provided to the municipality's employees.

• Over 6,500 employees have access to the AI-powered virtual agent

• The virtual agent draws from a knowledge base of over 6,000 public-sector-related topics and answers

• Employees can chat with Tore 24/7, both inside and outside contact center opening hours