Moveworks bets on NLU and ML to help CIOs improve employee experience

CIOs face what seems like an impossible task: Increase operational efficiency and improve the employee experience — and do it all without first understanding what’s slowing employees down.

A recent Freshworks report found that 82% of leaders acknowledge that employees will consider leaving if their current employer doesn’t provide access to the tools, technology or information they need to do their jobs well. Nearly three in five employees who do experience this frustration said it makes them less productive.

“CIOs are stuck between a rock and a hard place. A positive employee experience still remains core to running a successful business. But providing this experience in the world of hybrid work — especially when the job market is very hot — is very challenging,” said Varun Singh, cofounder and VP of product, Moveworks. “At the same time, CIOs are feeling pressure to improve operational efficiency as we possibly head into another recession. So as they attempt to provide world-class support, they’re also being forced to cut costs.”

To deliver a great experience efficiently, CIOs need unprecedented insight into the drivers of employee experience — then they need to allocate the appropriate funds to the most impactful projects. But knowing with certainty which projects will have the biggest impact on the employee experience and the overall business is a challenge. As a result, big problems go unaddressed for long periods of time, employees waste time resolving avoidable issues and the business suffers financially.

To address this issue, Mountain View, California-based AI startup, Moveworks, today launched Employee Experience Insights (EXI) — an analytics and insights solution that uses natural language understanding (NLU) and machine learning (ML) to uncover the issues slowing employees down the most. It’s designed to offer CIOs granular insights into the biggest issues plaguing each employee persona. And, while current ITSM (IT service management) insights tools focus primarily on tickets and SLAs (service-level agreements), EXI focuses entirely on people, which means businesses now have answers to critical questions such as the following:

• Which apps do employees need access to on day one?
• What are the biggest issues remote employees are running into?
• What are the most common issues employees spend time troubleshooting?
• How long is sales waiting for support for critical issues, vs. engineering, vs. marketing?
• How does our performance compare to industry standards and internal benchmarks?

“EXI analyzes unstructured data in tickets and gives CIOs clear insight into the exact drivers of poor employee experience, without the need for any manual data tagging. These data insights result in an actionable to-do list based on the initiatives that have the potential to create the biggest impact across the business,” Singh told VentureBeat.

The role of NLU and ML in Moveworks’ EXI

EXI relies on Moveworks’ proprietary NLU models to understand and categorize each employee issue. While most out-of-the-box NLU models are only able to categorize 20-30% of a company’s tickets when attempting this same analysis, Moveworks claims that its NLU models are able to categorize 100% of them because they are built on a foundation of best-in-class language models — like BERT and GPT.

Vaibhav Nivargi, cofounder and CTO of Moveworks, says each model is trained to understand the unstructured text in every IT ticket using methods like language detection, translation, spelling checking, entity typing, entity linking, dependency parsing, intent classification, etc. It then categorizes each ticket into a taxonomy consisting of action-resource primary entity combinations.

Additionally, unsupervised clustering shows the exact ticket short descriptions for a particular action-resource primary entity combination. These provide the widest understanding of the types of issues with the least amount of examples, so users can understand where employees are facing delays at a quick glance.

“EXI identifies the biggest issues plaguing a business at any given time. It breaks down support requests by each employee persona — whether it’s department specific, or remote vs. on-site employees — to help leaders remove inefficiencies across the entire business. This also helps leaders take proactive action to avoid future inefficiencies,” Bhavin Shah, cofounder and CEO, Moveworks, told VentureBeat. In some cases, employees spend nearly 60% of their time on work about work — like chasing approvals, searching for information, and troubleshooting IT issues. That’s over half of their time not spent on skilled, meaningful work. EXI helps business leaders resolve these issues in real time so employees can get back to more fulfilling work that drives the business forward.

Real-world performance

EXI is a new standalone analytics solution that works independently of Moveworks’ namesake product. By design it is industry-agnostic and is meant for any business looking to improve the employee experience for front-line workers who are submitting large volumes of tickets. Customers include Databricks, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), Palo Alto Networks and Nutanix.

“At Databricks, we know the right data and AI can transform how an organization does business,” said Naveen Zutshi, CIO of Databricks. “My job is to empower our digital workforce with the tools and technologies they need to perform at their best.”