Moveworks helps enterprises automate IT self-service tasks

IT issues take time to solve, which can cost enterprises money. A PagerDuty survey found 38.4% of organizations that take more than 30 minutes to resolve IT incidents see an impact on customer-facing services. Moreover, nearly one-third of departments regularly affected by technical problems say that an hour of downtime costs them $1 million or more.

That’s where Moveworks aims to make a difference. The Mountain View, California-based company, which was founded in 2016, is developing an AI platform that can resolve IT support issues automatically. Today marks the launch of Moveworks’ newest product, the Employee Service Platform, which brings together AI and natural language understanding technologies to get employees help across departments. Moveworks says that the system can handle human resources, finance, and facilities issues end-to-end, from the initial request to the final resolution.

According to CEO Bhavin Shah, Moveworks has been laying the groundwork for the Employee Service Platform since the company’s earliest days. Eighteen months ago, after experiencing success in the IT segment — Moveworks counts among its customers Palo Alto Networks, Slack, and LinkedIn — the company began building the platform. More recently, they started inviting customers in early access.

“Everything we do at Moveworks is inspired by a simple idea: It shouldn’t take days to get help at work,” Shah said. “Today, after half a decade, Moveworks … delivers instant help to all lines of business.”

Beyond answering questions about unlocking accounts, resetting passwords, and provisioning software, the Employee Service Platform helps surface forms, pull answers from knowledge bases, and route requests to the right subject-matter experts. The platform’s engine, which was trained on over 100 million real-world issues, combines domain recognition, semantic search, and deep integrations to address questions with answers from departments’ knowledge bases.

Most enterprises have to wrangle countless data buckets, some of which inevitably become underused or forgotten. A Forrester survey found that between 60% and 73% of all data within corporations is never analyzed for insights or larger trends. The opportunity cost of this unused data is substantial, with a Veritas report pegging it at $3.3 trillion by 2020.

“We engineered a unique approach to understanding the language used in the enterprise, which we deployed prior to this product expansion to resolve IT issues — without predefining specific intents or hard-coding rigid workflows. That approach is our multifaceted intent system,” CTO Vaibhav Nivargi told VentureBeat via email. “At a high level, it is a generalized natural language understanding system. Rather than predefining specific user intents, our multifaceted intent system determines the overarching action and resource type needed to resolve each issue. Once we’ve established this generalized intent, we then evaluate the utility of potential resources.”

The Employee Service Platform also transforms resources to display information in a conversational format inside collaboration tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and more. For example, users can fill out IT forms without leaving the Moveworks interface in Teams or receive only the pertinent paragraph of a human resources policy after asking Moveworks a question in Slack.

As part of the Employee Service Platform, Moveworks released the Employee Communications module, which enables company leaders to send messages via a cross-platform chatbot. The engine ingests knowledge articles and documents several times per day, enabling the chatbot to answer follow-up questions about messages autonomously.

The chatbot market is expected to reach $1.23 billion by 2025, according to Grand View Research, and there’s reason for its continued growth. Fifty-three percent of service organizations expect to use chatbots within 18 months, according to a Salesforce survey. And Gartner estimates that chatbots were powering 85% of all customer service interactions as of last year.

“Immediately following the pandemic, we saw a significant increase in the overall volume of tickets submitted to Moveworks — approximately twice as many in March 2020 than in February. Employees across industries needed to learn to use new collaboration tools, order new devices for the home office, look up colleagues’ contact information, troubleshoot Zoom, stay abreast of business continuity plans, and more,” Nivargi said. “Perhaps the most enduring challenge for companies in this work-from-anywhere economy is keeping their employees up-to-date and on the same page. … We responded to the demand by accelerating the creation of our new solution for employee communications. Our customers regularly achieve 50% to 70% engagement with communications campaigns done through Moveworks, compared to around 10% for the average mass email.”