And because AI systems get smarter the more they’re used, CARL is learning to answer more complex questions every day.ĬARL helps make life easier for the company’s employees as well as its HR departments. It spends its days helping Siemens employees access relevant, accurate content, both through interactive chats and by highlighting trending topics on his landing page. Now fluent in German, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and well-versed in 200-plus topics, CARL responds to approximately one million standard employee queries a month. This feature enables every Siemens location to quickly configure and customize its version of CARL based on employees’ unique needs.ĬARL, which is named after a son of the Siemens founder Werner von Siemens, now provides HR-related support to 280,000 Siemens employees across 20 countries. The panel allows the Siemens HR staff to implement different topics quickly, without the need for IT support.

One of the chatbot’s most unique features is a built-in administrative panel, which functions as a content management system. But from the very beginning, CARL’s architecture was designed to easily scale and adapt to accommodate increasing numbers of users, languages and topics as it expands to other Siemens sites.ĬARL’s chat capability runs on IBM Cloud, with Watson Assistant and Watson Discovery as core components. These topics included sick leave, vacation, travel plans, share matching and ongoing education and training. It initially programmed the chatbot to address five topics that Siemens employees in Germany most often inquired about. In keeping with design thinking practices, the development team prioritized the user experience in creating CARL. But just three months after the team co-developed CARL, it made its debut to an audience of 120,000 employees in the Siemens German and Austrian locations. Since CARL would ultimately serve as a single point of contact for all HR-related questions in every Siemens location, its architecture required unprecedented scalability and adaptability. The team then focused on the complex task of designing CARL with the capabilities and attributes that would meet Siemens HR’s requirements. The development team first built what would become CARL’s home, a new Siemens HR landing page that would connect the IT landscape between Siemens and IBM. “I think a strong team spirit, combined with consistently using an agile, design thinking framework, was integral to creating CARL so quickly.”

“In development team meetings, you couldn’t distinguish between Siemens and IBM employees, nor between the IT and HR people,” said Joerg Brueckner, Associate Partner, IBM Global Business Services®. These approaches were new to the involved Siemens employees, but they quickly learned and embraced the principles, and the group members quickly formed a strong team bond. Representatives from IBM and Siemens met regularly to foster the creativity and fast iteration associated with agile and design thinking methodologies. After Siemens green-lighted the project, IBM and Siemens specialists formed a development team to co-create - and continually evolve - CARL, an HR interactive virtual agent.ĬARL: A virtual agent that speaks HR’s language The landing page would house a cognitive HR virtual agent that all employees, regardless of location or device, could access around-the-clock. The workshop’s output included plans to build a Siemens HR intranet landing page, which was employees’ first source of HR information. We realized that we had a golden opportunity to explore new ways of working to achieve our goals, and that’s when we contacted IBM.”Īn IBM team and several members of the Siemens HR and IT divisions met in Hamburg, Germany during a three-day IBM Enterprise Design Thinking™ workshop. Sabine Rinser-Willuhn, Manager, HR Systems at Siemens AG, says: “We had a solution in place in Germany which provided links to several HR IT applications, but we needed to replace it.

The team envisioned using digital technologies to provide employees with interactive experiences and quicker, more accurate answers to questions - regardless of location, device or time of day. The company’s corporate HR leaders were eager to embrace these same technologies and use them internally to better support a 379,000-person global workforce. As the company evolved into the global technology leader it is today, its core value of commitment to innovation has remained the basis for its success.Īs part of its digital transformation initiative, Siemens has integrated automation and AI into many of its processes to deliver exceptional service to customers and partners.

Siemens was founded in 1847, and its first invention - the electrical pointer telegraph - ushered in the modern era of telecommunication. Business challenge story New options for HR support in the digital age

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