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November 28, 2023

Iveco Group amplifies employee productivity with Chat IVG, powered by Azure OpenAI

Iveco Group determined that artificial intelligence (AI) could tackle a wide-ranging opportunity and challenge for the enterprise. Iveco Group is the first manufacturer/automotive company headquartered in Italy to adopt Azure OpenAI services in a production environment by creating an internal smart chatbot called "Chat IVG," leveraging generative AI. As Chat IVG gains wide acceptance, Iveco Group is identifying, experimenting, and expanding AI use for scenarios where everyday work requires access to a large amount of data, communications, and documentation.

Iveco Group

“We want people to concentrate on using AI as a tool to solve their problems. It´s our people who are creative—who are responsible and hold the key to producing results with this new superpower—not the AI technology.”

Fabio Ricciato, Head of IT Customer Journey & Digital Architecture, Artificial Intelligence and DEX, Iveco Group

“We go beyond.” That’s key to Iveco Group’s mission—and powers the organization always to be at the cutting edge of technology, to be agile, and to give its customers all possible value as quickly as possible. 

“We want to use the most modern technology to make our people epic. By epic, I mean enabling them to be more productive with less effort—and producing the best results for the customer,” says Fabio Ricciato, Head of IT Customer Journey, Digital Architecture, AI and DEX, Iveco Group. Dramatic improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities presented promising opportunities for employees.

Iveco Group is committed to transforming its business and leading the change to a more sustainable future. It constantly pushes towards new solutions and drives innovation in its products and services. Iveco Group has been pioneering the development of environmentally friendly technologies as part of its commitment to safe, efficient, and ecological mobility. With more than 35,000 employees, Iveco Group manufactures in 20 industrial sites around the world using the most advanced technology. Iveco Group is the home of eight unique, yet unified brands. Its product range includes light, medium, and heavy commercial vehicles (IVECO), powertrain (FPT Industrial), buses (HEULIEZ, IVECO BUS), financial services (IVECO CAPITAL), and specialty vehicles (IDV, ASTRA, and MAGIRUS).

Putting AI to work

Iveco Group is the first manufacturer/automotive company headquartered in Italy to adopt Azure OpenAI services in a production environment by creating an internal smart chatbot called "Chat IVG." Available in Teams, Chat IVG can be used for questions and answers and to extract information from the organization’s own data and documents. “In the mature generative AI from Microsoft, we saw enterprise-level innovation, democratization, and security of data that we could put to work immediately,” says Ricciato.

Azure OpenAI was a natural choice as Iveco Group uses Microsoft Office 365 and other modern workplace technologies. Iveco Group was able to take advantage of industry-leading AI technology, and a cloud-scale data and app platform from Microsoft to deliver adaptive, responsive, and personalized experiences by building and modernizing intelligent applications with Azure. “We found the Azure AI capabilities integration was easy. We were able to streamline our Chat IVG project and focus our efforts where they mattered most—on harmonic user experience, harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence on the identified innovative use cases and putting this technology in hands of our people as soon and smoothly as possible.,” says Ricciato.

Iveco Group determined that generative AI could tackle a wide-ranging opportunity for Iveco Group, reinventing its employee experience. In the fast-paced world of technology, speed is of the essence. Iveco Group recognized the need to quickly provide enterprise-level AI solutions that are not only efficient and user-friendly, but also secure and protective. Azure's advanced security features and compliance offerings provided Iveco Group with the assurance that its data is always protected. This not only helped it to maintain the integrity of its operations but also fostered a sense of trust among its colleagues. 

Ricciato and his team introduced Chat IVG quickly, making it available initially to just a handful of employees from IT and business functions. These early adopters had the freedom to experiment with AI for a few-days trial period without any pressure to complete specific tasks. An early objective was to teach these new users about AI in a secure, controlled environment. As the trial period ended, this first group was reluctant to give up Chat IVG. And word of mouth soon led other employees to request access. Chat IVG went from five to 25 to hundreds of users. Employees rated Chat IVG 4.7 out of 5 on a Net Promoter Score (NPS) and chose 5 out of 5 when asked whether they wanted to continue using it.

As more employees gained access, Ricciato, his colleagues, and his team collaborated with Microsoft to educate them, first with events for Iveco Group managers, and later with a website, webinars, and more for the rest of the company. Ricciato says, “We allowed our colleagues to adopt AI naturally and never required its use. Over just a few months, we created a culture within the company that was well versed in AI and that was using it to support every business unit.” 

Employees were so quick to learn the tools and enable themselves that not a single person has needed help to use Chat IVG. “We used to talk about AI having a ´wow´ effect,” says Ricciato, “Now we look for the ´know´ effect, as AI´s becoming a natural tool for our colleagues. We want them to know and take full advantage of our new entity, Chat IVG.” 

Encouraging employee creativity and enhancing productivity 

Many use cases and autonomous projects are being developed and deployed in production based on Chat IVG specific customizations or using the Chat IVG architecture as a foundation. Chat IVG is fostering huge impact in terms of internal business user experience, augmented productivity levels among different business units, and faster, more effective customer support.

Security has been a key consideration from the beginning. Iveco Group needed to mitigate any risk of AI, ensure its data was secure, and respect privacy and compliance requirements. The highly secure cloud foundation of Azure, along with Microsoft built-in security controls and compliance, were essential to Iveco Group´s successful AI deployment.

At Iveco Group, AI is providing valuable support to colleagues across the enterprise. “We want people to concentrate on using AI as a tool to solve their problems. It´s our people who are creative—who are responsible, in charge, and hold the key to producing results with this new superpower—not the AI technology,” says Ricciato. As Chat IVG gains wide acceptance, Iveco Group is identifying and expanding AI use for scenarios where everyday work requires access to a large amount of data, communications, and documentation. “We look forward to embedded AI services within Microsoft 365, Copilot, and other tools,” notes Ricciato. “Having put together the right stakeholders at the right moments for Chat IVG, it will be easier for us to progress with our strategy and roadmap and continue to drive innovation.”

Find out more about Iveco Group on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

“We look forward to embedded AI services within Microsoft 365, and other tools. Having put together the right stakeholders at the right moments for Chat IVG, it will be easier for us to progress with our strategy and roadmap and continue to drive innovation.”

Fabio Ricciato, Head of IT Customer Journey & Digital Architecture, Artificial Intelligence and DEX, Iveco Group

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