Rianne van Veldhuizen, the upbeat Managing Director of AWS in Australia and New Zealand, highlighted two very different customer case studies at the recent Data and AI Day in Melbourne.
The first was about leading health insurer nib Group (ASX: NHF) which is using Amazon Bedrock to support customer service, automate call centre operations and invoice processing, and personalise travel insurance recommendations for its members.
According to nib, since its launch in 2021, nibby, nib’s quirky-named AI-powered voice and text AI assistant, has handled four million member queries and delivered more than $22 million in savings, according to van Veldhuizen.
The second case study was from left field – how AWS is using artificial intelligence to help capture and preserve the Ngalia language, an indigenous language which has just three fluent speakers, a number of partial speakers and was in danger of being lost forever.
The Melbourne Data and AI Day was attended by more than 1,500 mainly business owners. It was followed two days later by a similar event in Sydney.
Van Veldhuizen outlined AWS’s investment in Australia and New Zealand including investing $13.2 billion over the next two years into cloud infrastructure “to create opportunities and to build a resilient infrastructure here locally. This will contribute $35 billion to Australia's economy by 2027 and support an estimated 11,000 jobs locally.”
“That is on top of the $9.1 billion we have invested since 2012.”
“We are also building Australia's tech pipeline, collaborating with universities and TAFE on real world cloud courses.”
Van Veldhuizen said New Zealand is also a focus. “We are investing $7.5 billion into the region adding an estimated $10.8 billion to New Zealand's GDP over the next 15 years.
“Our commitment to Australia and New Zealand runs deep. We're investing, we're innovating, and we're showing that world class technology knows no boundaries.”
nib case study in detail
The majority of nib's generative AI workloads are using Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet. In the past six months, the group has integrated generative AI across several of its businesses to support customer service, augment call centres and claims processing, and personalise travel insurance recommendations.
By reducing the need for manual support, nibby has lowered chat-based interaction support by 60% and voice call support by 15%.
With recent enhancements, nibby can better understand complex queries with multiple follow-up questions and personalise its interactions with members leading to faster resolution and higher customer satisfaction.
Additionally, nib uses Amazon Bedrock to automatically generate and summarise notes from customer chats and calls, reducing post-call work by up to 20%, and allowing more members to be served quickly and efficiently. nib also uses Amazon Bedrock to enhance its internal knowledge base by summarising and analysing knowledge articles, to provide accurate and timely responses to member inquiries, resulting in an 8% reduction in average call times.
These augmentations help call centre agents focus on more complex queries that require direct support and deeper empathy.
Other improvements include:
- Using an AI tool that automatically reads and processes text from documents with near-100% accuracy, to automate member claims and process over four million invoices annually.
- Offers travel insurance plans for international and domestic trips with coverage options including medical assistance, lost luggage and trip cancellations. nib can create personalised email marketing campaigns based on predicted destinations.
Ngalia language case study in detail
The Ngalia indigenous language is spoken fluently by just three people – Kado, Talbot and Zabar Muir. There are some who can partially speak it, but no children speak it or are learning it.
To prevent the complete loss of the language, Kado Muir is leading a conservative effort to preserve his people’s 60,000-year-old culture. “Our language is not just words,” Muir explains, “it's the key to our identity, our connection to country, and our way of understanding the world.”
To preserve their language a collaboration has been set up between the Ngalia Heritage Research Council (Aboriginal Corporation), Kiwa Digital (a global Indigenous-led technology company originally from New Zealand), and AWS using the latest in artificial intelligence to help safeguard this irreplaceable knowledge.
Kiwa Digital has developed a digital archival system to store, manage, interact, and publish cultural assets. Using Kiwa Digital’s CultureQ app, which is built on AWS and underpinned by generative AI, Indigenous communities can promote knowledge and cultural sustainability.
CultureQ provides text-to-speech, voice generation, translation capabilities, and chat functionality that helps users practice and revitalise languages and cultures.
“Until now, Indigenous people had limited ways to preserve language and culture. Using generative AI integrated into CultureQ, users can now have conversations and interact with their cultural data in a secure, managed environment, when previously they were only able to access static content,” said Steven Renata, managing board director, Kiwa Digital. “AWS plays a central role in fostering a respectful digital environment that promotes Indigenous self-determination, knowledge, and cultural sustainability.”
Some of the Indigenous content being preserved on CultureQ includes stories passed down through centuries of story-telling. The mobile app combines Indigenous Dreamtime storytelling with educational content focused on science, specifically aimed at teaching children about the lifecycle of the antlion, known as Mamutjitji in Ngalia language, to preserve the story and language for future generations.