2024-05-13 09:39:08
When Gabriela López, Global Internal Control & Risk Management Vice President of Grupo Bimbofaced the task of consolidating the almost 200 internal policies of the
Grupo Bimbo, in order to bring closer and enhance the company’s culture, found that it was not enough to develop a communication tool, but that it had to have the capacity to interact with its 145,000 collaborators, as they call their employees.
“First we developed a chatbot, but if you don’t feed it with the correct and necessary information, when you ask it something it doesn’t know, it doesn’t answer, and people become demotivated. That was the great challenge,” explains López.
Grupo Bimbo, created in Mexico in 1945 and today one of the leaders in its sector internationally with presence in Latin America, the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa, is no stranger to innovation.
This time, the company sought to apply that same strategy behind closed doors. The objective of López and his team was to bring together the Group’s compliance policies in one place and make it easier for employees to consult them quickly and easily through a search engine that would also allow them to interact, ask questions and access information thanks to to a personalized experience and in the different languages spoken within the company.
To achieve this, Grupo Bimbo decided to use Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Through Microsoft Azure AI technologies, such as Azure Open AI Service, Form Recognizer y Cognitive Search, Grupo Bimbo’s Business Technology team developed in two weeks a solution that integrates a co-pilot where the user can make inquiries about the company’s policies. Grupo Bimbo’s control and risk co-pilot uses advanced AI technology to send information in a synthesized way, in addition to a reference guide, with the global policy to respond with sources of consultation.
“This solution allows us to remove barriers, now people can enter and consult the policies in a simple way, in the language they need,” he comments. Raúl Blanco, AI & Advanced Analytics Lead at Grupo Bimbowho was the director of the team in charge of developing Copilot Products, as these solutions are known within the company.
The Copilot Product can respond in all languages where Bimbo has collaborators and operates, such as Brazil, Canada, Rumania or Mexicoand other countries where it has a presence, regardless of what language the consultation was made in.
“The search is simple and the answers are immediate, it saves a lot of time in search and translation issues,” says López who, when remembering the chatbot they had before and comparing it with this new solution, highlights that the chatbot “was very stuffy and not very flexible, it was not so agile, you had to ask many questions to get to the answer and now, with AI, to the first question you already have the answer immediately.”
The main benefit of this solution, according to López, is that promotes compliance with Group policies, same that apply to all Grupo Bimbo collaborators, in the 34 countries in which they have a presence. Previously, the complexity of finding a policy, such as when expanding their presence into new markets, could be a reason for failure to comply. Now, new collaborators can access and learn more directly about the company’s culture and, when taking a trip, they can consult the policies for purchasing plane tickets, rates, lodging, food, among others.
“We ran the risk of policies becoming a dead letter. You have a huge library and it turns out that no one consults them because the search is very complex. Now there is going to be a lot of alignment,” says López.
Grupo Bimbo decided to replicate the technology to create the first Copilot Product and thus empower all individuals and other departments alike, such as the Global Communications team. The communications Copilot Product, also powered by Microsoft AI, has different tools that They help the team generate emails, content for social media, image proposals for marketing and communication projects, text translation, among other. And because the tool is a co-pilot, the user is in control. “We are looking for a better user experience,” he says Diego Bustos, Chief Data Officer of Grupo Bimbo. The objective, he explains, “is to facilitate the work of collaborators.”
Greater efficiency and strategic investment of team time has been the result of applying this solution, he says María Elena Ramírez, Global Communications Intelligence Manager & Governance at Grupo Bimbowhich has allowed us to have a greater capacity to generate new ideas and projects.
The Group’s own technology team also applied solutions to improve efficiency in your sales by integrating AI in your Power BI dashboards and improve forecast visualizations. To get this, They trained the AI model to analyze and forecast where sales will move. Thanks to this, the company can design plans to boost sales and anticipate scenarios that can improve its performance.
Digital transformation
At Grupo Bimbo they approached two approaches when creating these solutions, taking advantage of the benefits offered by the Machine Learning (ML) and Generative AI.
“The first is to know and investigate the possibilities and the second is to transform the way we work to do much more and in an easier way,” he says. Jose Antonio Parra, Vice President Global Digital Transformation and Data & Analytics of Bimbo Group. “For us, who are in several countries, constantly growing and our business involves thousands of people and millions of customers, we could not miss the moment to adopt AI to maintain our leadership in the baking industry.”
Grupo Bimbo decided to use Microsoft’s AI technology, since its business environment works, for the most part, with Microsoft solutions and expanding its capabilities through AI made perfect sense for the company. “We have a very good relationship with Microsoft, it is a leader in its industry and the solutions they offer are also those that best connect with our business environment,” says Parra.
Regarding the collaboration with Grupo Bimbo, Rodrigo Kede, President of Americas Enterprise at Microsoftcomments, “Microsoft’s collaboration with Grupo Bimbo is a great example of how an innovation mindset and new AI capabilities can accelerate the transformation of such a large company that is already a leader in its industry.”
An important aspect when starting to build Copilot Products was data. The quality of these is essential for their operation. According to Bustos, “data is like flour, the production line is where we do the entire computing process, you cannot have errors, and the raw material (the data) has to be of the best quality.”
Along with quality, Data security has been fundamental for Grupo Bimbo in these implementations. Grupo Bimbo co-pilots use internal company information, so they must make sure to keep it protected. Thanks to the responsible AI capabilities integrated into Azure, Grupo Bimbo maintains privacy, transparency and trust in its data.
The next step, after development, presentation of solutions and testing periods, is implementation. Grupo Bimbo has launched these applications globally, in the countries where it has a presence, such as Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Romania, among others, so that all its collaborators can learn about them and begin to use them and experiment with them.
A change in work culture driven by AI
According to Parra, all roles will be transformed by this technology. AI is going to enrich people and empower them. And that is what Grupo Bimbo seeks with its implementation: empowered people, regardless of their function and organization.
In the case of the Control and Risk area, López is sure that the AI-powered solution will become a habit so that people can ask questions about internal policies. For Ramírez, in Communication, as a global team, it will allow them to “standardize quality, we will be able to be more efficient in terms of costs and we will be able to dedicate more time to the analytical part and make better decisions.”
For Bustos, AI is going to put them in a privileged position, since They will be able to know their consumers and clients faster, in addition to being able to provide faster responses to the market. According to your vision, you will have more agility and greater capacity for predictability, to anticipate and personalize solutions, in addition to facilitating repetitive tasks and easy to interact with. “AI has to increase the capabilities of human beings, not replace them,” says Bustos.
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