- With the processes of digitalization and automation of Protección, the request for Severance withdrawals is now at the distance of a click for all its clients.
- With the new services of Azure Open AI, Protección projects to accomplish an automation of 80% of the severance withdrawals requests.
- In addition, with the support of the AI from Microsoft, Protección has automatic response models for petitions, concerns, complaints, grievances, and virtual assistants for consultations about savings and investments.
September 26, 2023. Severances are a key figure in economic protection for employees in Colombia. It consists of a mandatory saving that the employer pays and is available when the employee is laid off or unemployed. But, in addition, the severances have become a fundamental income that facilitates the acquisition and improvement of housing and that also promotes education. According to Asofondos, the total value of the severance private funds reached 15,9 trillion by the of 2022 and over half of the withdrawals made were destined towards the purchase, improvement, or release of housing.
Therefore, the severances do not only provide economic protection, instead they have become a fundamental ally for a good portion of the 35% of Colombians, who seek to acquire their own housing, remodel their home, or release mortgage payments. For this reason, accessing those resources in an expedite and efficient manner may mean for a family the opportunity to improve their quality of life, consolidate or value their patrimony.
However, Processing millions of solicitations without compromising the safety of the information and guaranteeing greater speeds, is a challenge that requires revision processes that are manual, repetitive, and cumbersome. Aware of this, Protección, one of Colombia’s most renowned pension, severance, and investment fund administrators, decided to confront the challenge with the help of technology.
This private fund has over 32 years of operation, and until recently it concentrated it services in physical offices, through procedures that demanded not only the presence of its clients but also the availability to carry them out. As part of its digital transformation, Protección has been incorporating technology and digital services such as the cloud, to accomplish a more efficient and agile attention.
“Four years ago, we initiated an automation process with Artificial Intelligence for the withdrawal of severances that consists in analyzing the information provided by the employer to determine if it meets the requirements. Thanks to this automation process, in 2022 we managed to meet 53% of total requests in an automated manner, saving our clients from having to travel to our offices and optimizing our operative processes” explained Alexander Gutiérrez, leader of the Protección Artificial Intelligence team.
However, in the withdrawal of severances for housing and education purposes, Protección has encountered challenges that only the AI could solve since there aren’t any unique and uniform formats in which traditional automation alone could operate with efficiency. This leads to the extraction of information and the analysis of each of the documents that support the request to be complex and imply the manual revision in many cases.
Open AI for greater request processing
“With the technological services based on traditional Artificial Intelligence we had already reached a very positive result, but we knew that with new solutions that integrate the large language models (LLM) and Generative Artificial Intelligence, we could reach a much higher percentage of effectiveness.” Added Gutiérrez. Therefore, Protección initiated in 2023 a pilot integrated with Microsoft Open AI services, that allowed them to process successfully 22 thousand requests yielding 50% more productivity in said cases where the letters had not been able to be processed automatically by the initial model.
The difference with the previous platform, Gutiérrez adds, is the effort that is required to train the models and their effectiveness percentage. “With Open AI through the process of fine-tuning, calibration or refinement, greater and much faster results are accomplished. This way, we hope to migrate what already works to a generative AI model and increase at least 20% of the amount of automatically processed requests to reach a total level of automation of at least 80%.”
One solution for multiple processes
The automation of severance withdrawals has improved considerably the client experience in terms of ease and agility within the procedure, as well as saving time and resources. In the same way, it has inspired the transformation of other habitual processes in Protección, based on the same AI services with some particular adaptations for other areas of the company.
It is worth noting that the projects that Protección has with services of Open AI do not stop there. To attend customer requests, AI services have also been incorporated, which optimize the answer process with much more richness and understanding of the context, and in natural language.
“At Protección in recent years we have made a categorical commitment towards innovation and digital transformation, leveraging, among others, two strategic priorities such as our customer satisfaction and the pursuit for operational efficiency. We have built and scaled a set of digital capacities based on robotics, analytics and artificial intelligence that today shows us compelling results. We are convinced that the adoption of this new paradigm of Generative AI will allow us to find infinite opportunities to add value towards our clients and other groups of interest” states Mauricio Ferrer, Vice President of Technology and Customer Services at Protección.
“We are at the vanguard of AI transformation, and the possibilities are endless as demonstrated by the Protección case. This is a clear example of how the Azure Open AI service provides access to Open AI models that allow the creation of real value and well-being for millions of people”, indicates Juan Carlos Uribe, Director of the Enterprise Segment for Microsoft.
About Protección
Protección S.A. is an expert company in savings and investments, it has 30 years of experience in the administration of resources for more than 130 trillion pesos from 8,3 million clients of severances, and mandatory, voluntary pensions and over 73 thousand pensioners. The company has transcended in its category, dynamizing the businesses vision and the handling of assets destined towards mandatory pensions and severances, to take it to a next level implies the mobilization and management of savings to be an ally of its groups of interest with the purpose to accompany them in the fulfillment of their dreams and construction of their future.
