Major biotech firm saves $1 million annually with conversational AI
CIO embraces conversational AI to slash IT costs without compromising employee support
A leading global biotechnology firm specializing in cancer treatments. The company’s market capitalization has quadrupled over the last five years, reaching approximately $27 billion, driven by the release of several new therapies.
Challenge
Slow IT support constraining the productivity of highly skilled workforce
Result
Reduced the resolution time of IT issues from 2-3 days to just seconds, saving employees tens of thousands of hours of busy work
The Problem
Biotech firm makes a cost reduction case for modernizing IT
To unlock the productivity of a growing workforce, the CIO of a leading biotechnology firm recognized that core processes like tech support needed to become more efficient and scalable. With the conventional support model, employees' tech problems took an average of three days to fix, as the service desk had to address even routine issues manually. Given the urgency of developing the company’s treatments, the IT team began searching for an innovative solution to provide IT help at scale, available day or night, and in real time.
“We were a one-drug, one-location company for almost 20 years, so there wasn’t as great a need to mature our IT operations,” the CIO said. “We’re now a three-drug, multiple-location company in high-growth mode, which makes modernizing and scaling our employee support a top priority.”
Modernizing a multibillion-dollar company is easier said than done, especially with the legacy systems that were in place. When the CIO started at the firm, the IT environment was such that "nothing was in the cloud" and "everything had to be manually updated" — making digital transformation a significant challenge. Beyond implementing cloud services and AI-powered automation, the team also needed to prove the value of these new technologies to a skeptical workforce.
The Solution
A powerful IT cost reduction strategy: conversational AI
In March 2019, the leading biotechnology firm deployed Moveworks AI Assistant. Moveworks is an AI solution that instantly resolves tech problems and policy questions. Employees simply tell the Assistant what they need using conversational language, and the bot handles the rest. Now, IT issues ranging from resetting passwords to requesting software licenses to troubleshooting devices get fixed immediately, directly on Microsoft Teams.
For the CIO, one of the primary advantages of Moveworks was its ability to deliver end-to-end resolution through deep integrations with other systems. By communicating with Okta, for instance, the Assistant can provision software without any manual intervention from the service desk and without any delay for the employee who requested the tool.
The Assistant is currently addressing about 1,000 questions every month for the firm's employees. Moveworks’ search abilities map these questions to the precise answer in the company’s knowledge base, providing just the right paragraph rather than linking to a long article. This time savings, multiplied by tens of thousands of tech issues, has allowed the company to buy back 60,000 hours of productivity and save over one million dollars per year.
The Result
Modernizing IT is just the beginning
Moveworks has reshaped every facet of the IT support process at the leading biotechnology firm. Employee satisfaction with the IT team has skyrocketed, as Moveworks AI Assistant autonomously resolves a third of all tech issues. More importantly, from an operational perspective, the CIO has found that the AI empowers her team to offload routine issues and “focus on more impactful work” — such as addressing inefficiencies identified by Moveworks itself.
Beyond the growing number of use cases that Moveworks handles directly, the Assistant has transformed the sentiment around AI in general. The CIO noted that “when people realize they can resolve their IT issues without waiting for a human to help, they start to expect it in other areas.” That’s why, for this biotechnology firm, IT support is only the beginning of a powerful partnership with Moveworks.
Key integrations
