Tata Consultancy Services’ cognitive business operation solution TCS Cognix has become its master key to unlocking mega deals in just a year of its launch. In the last quarter alone, the IT services major reported six large deal wins across high-tech and oil and gas sectors, among others, through Cognix solution. TCS now wants to aggressively promote the offering and create similar solutions for new and existing customers.
Cognix is an AI-driven human-machine collaborating suite with pre-built solutions, combining business process management, IT applications or software and data centres and servers in one product. The solution is customized to the needs of each company and even verticals like HR, CFO, CMO and CIO, to name a few. For instance, there is a niche offering for CFOs called COGNIZ cash flow command centre. The CFO will get a predictive analysis on which customers they can have payment issues with and records of how much money their company would receive.
“Last quarter we won about six large deals on the back of Cognix where we will be delivering transformation of operating models to the customers. We have won a large deal in a high-tech industry. We won another large deal in the technology and oil and gas industry. We are looking at solving industry specific challenges. We have 1000 plus overall customers and are looking at contextual knowledge from those customers, the industry trends and then preparing all these solutions. So, our solution is highly customized to the customer needs and the industry need. Of course, the needs for B2B industry is different from B2C, but those nuances we have inbuilt into the solution which we have,” Ashok Pai - VP and Global Head, Cognitive Business Operations, TCS told
Geographically, Cognix has been adopted across countries. TCS got a couple of these deals from North America, a couple of them from European clients and one from the Asia Pacific. TCS Cognix is operating across 15 different industry verticals. “We have more than a hundred solutions as part of Cognix and we have crossed more than a hundred customers installed base in the first year of launching this,” Pai said.
Reaching customers
TCS has been proposing the solution for new tenders and companies approaching them to transform their operations. “It is not just lift and shift, but it is mostly lift, transform, shift or, lift, shift, transform depending upon the customer scenario. And we look at customers’ strategic priorities and their pain points.”
“From a cognitive business operations perspective, it is pretty much there in every single proposal which we give, also because it is a transformative solution. We have got an aggressive plan to deploy this solution to the current customer base as well. We have an operations maturity model in place,” Pai said.
TCS will first look at the customer’s request, the maturity level of their operations and pick solutions accordingly to take the company to the next level.
Transformation and innovation pipeline
One of the key clients is Australia-based AGL, a multiproduct energy retailer with whom TCS has been working for over a decade now. AGL has over 4.2 million retail consumers, and their biggest challenge was to process the data gathered from billions of records from the smart meters and thousands of interactions that happen every day, either through voice calls or web chat or emails and social media interaction.
TCS deployed Cognix’s analytics solution to help gather insights. Earlier, if a new customer of AGL called in saying that he wanted to move from Sydney to Melbourne, they would first contact the backup and write an email. Then an agent took this information and updated the ERP database, saying there was a change request.
Pai explained, “By using Cognix, now when the voice call happens, we convert the voice to text using natural language processing (NLP) and from that NLP we know that there is a moving request which has come, and the software sends an alert to the back office saying that there is a moving request so please let's make sure that the ERP is updated and the entire end-to-end process happens. These kinds of interventions were put in so that the customer experience greatly improves.”
Ultimately such processes help improve the net promoter score for AGL, which is a very large customer for TCS where they manage the business process work, the IT work and the infrastructure layer.
Next up, TCS wants to continue building additional value builders on the core product, which they are currently working on. These will be developed across industries and business functions, including finance, HR, supply chain, and some involving IoT solutions and analytics.
TCS is currently working with a large media company to help the client company track earnings call and simultaneous insights from the CEOs and CFOs during their speech in real-time. Cognix can extract key messages sent to its back-office that analyses the data through AI and ML within nine minutes. The filtered information is then sent to the terminal or ticker of the media houses’ channel.