Bot and messaging leader Kore has been working with SAP to enable customers to ‘build their own’ NLP-driven enterprise bots. Freya Purnell reports.
Ever wanted a helpful android to step into your office and take on some of the ‘busy work’ that takes an ever-increasing amount of time in business? Kore Inc is working towards this vision, as well as creating engaging experiences in the B2C context, with bots specifically designed for the enterprise.
In May at SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando, Kore launched a new suite of bots designed to help users communicate more simply with systems running SAP solutions.
While the Kore Bot Store already has more than 130 enterprise and personal bots designed to perform thousands of different tasks, Kore is now enabling organisations to design, create and deliver Natural Language Processing (NLP) enabled bots with the launch of the Kore Bots Platform.
Bots built using the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) can communicate via text, email, messaging tools such as Facebook, Slack, Kore’s own messaging platform, or within a company website or mobile app. The company also plans to add more communication channels in the coming months.
Announcing the launch of the platform, Kore CEO Raj Koneru said, “We’ve quickly reached the point where having an app for everything is more overwhelming than helpful both at work and in our personal lives. The solution is clearly bots, but building bots for the enterprise – that go beyond fancy notification systems to provide significant value is unchartered territory for most developers, and that presents a challenge.”
The Bots Platform is designed to make bot-building a “painless process” for developers.
“Our platform empowers developers of all sophistication levels to build bots that truly converse with and guide employees, teams and customers through once time-consuming tasks, in a manner that is consistent, scalable and repeatable. The Kore Bots Platform is elevating bot technology, machine learning and artificial intelligence from novelty to necessity.”
Kore has also introduced Kora, a virtual personal assistant designed specifically for work. Unlike bots that are focused on single tasks such as scheduling meetings, Kore can undertake more than 800 tasks in 130 different systems, including Salesforce, SAP ERP, Microsoft CRM, Concur, SuccessFactors, Jira, ZenDesk, Trello and Box.
Working hand-in-glove with SAP
Robin Kearon, SVP, channels and alliance at Kore, said the new Bots Platform has tight, secure and robust integration with all of SAP’s applications – capability gained through months and months of technical work directly with SAP. In fact, Kore is so far the only company to have achieved such integration across the entire SAP solution portfolio.
“One of the things that SAP is particularly excited about is that we can leverage HANA Cloud Platform to allow an SAP customer to connect securely to both on-premise and cloud applications,” said Kearon.
This covers traditional on-premise ECC systems as well as the newer, cloud-based solutions such as SuccessFactors, Concur and S/4HANA.
While Kore offers bots that specifically work with these applications out of the box, to undertake tasks relevant to the application, he said the power of Kore is actually in the platform, so that organisations can tailor the bots to their needs.
“By design, bots are intended to be configured specific to the end customer. So if you’ve implemented Sales and Distribution within SAP, you have configured that for your business, and your bots need to be configured appropriately for your way of working,” Kearon said. “We provide the tools to do that so that actually you can make those configurations in a few hours.”
Though Kore can be connected to SAP via NetWeaver Gateway, HANA Cloud Platform is preferred because of what Kearon says are the advantages it brings to the table – including ease of deployment, having access to SAP’s cloud connector and SAP Single Sign-on, and its process integration.
In addition to SAP, Kore supports another 120 enterprise applications. For companies which are not wall-to-wall SAP shops – for example, running Salesforce for CRM – can use Kore to “transcend both heterogeneous and homogeneous environments”.
“Because it consumes a payload from Salesforce, digests it, takes the information and passes it to another system, Kore can take an opportunity from Salesforce and present that to be a quote in SAP, for example,” Kearon said.
Humanising service
Though Kore was often met with confusion when it first began talking about enterprise bots a year ago, having other players such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook outline their vision for how bots might contribute to greater productivity has helped to legitimise the concept.
In the enterprise context, there is often still some groundwork to be laid with customers new to bots, particularly around understanding what they can do and working through potential use cases.
Interaction with SAP Hybris is a particularly fertile ground when considering how Kore bots can be deployed. For example, by using the NLP capability of Kore bots to allow a consumer to simply ask what they are looking for on a website, the experience is simplified and humanised.
“Telling a bot, ‘I want this, this and this’, is a natural human expression. Kore is taking that human intent and passing that instruction back to Hybris. Hybris provides [that information], and the website is updated to deliver it to the consumer,” Kearon said. “It’s a far easier way of providing a very powerful engagement model. There are so many different examples where making that ‘conversational commerce’ or conversational service experience is taken to a whole new level through human expression.”
And this could have application in both private and public sector contexts. In Australia, Kore, together with SAP, has been exploring ways that its bots could work with both SAP Hybris and SAP CRM on particular service scenarios for the Department of Human Services.
According to Kearon, it all comes down to making the experience as seamless and natural as possible.
“The basic principle of Kore is that we believe it should be as easy for a person to communicate with the system as we have all become used to communicating with other people.”
