Seagen saves 1 million dollars a year with conversational AI
Seagen’s CIO Laury Miller turned to conversational AI to reduce IT costs, without sacrificing the company’s employee support experience.
Seagen is a global biotechnology firm that specializes in cancer treatments. Founded in 1998, the company’s market capitalization has quadrupled over the last five years to reach approximately $27 billion — alongside its release of several new therapies.
Challenge
Slow IT support constraining the productivity of highly skilled workforce
Result
Reduced the resolution time of IT issues from 2-3 days to just seconds, saving employees tens of thousands of hours of busy work
The Problem
Seagen makes a cost reduction case for modernizing IT
To unlock the productivity of a growing workforce, Seagen’s CIO Laury Miller knew that core processes like tech support had to become more efficient and scalable. With the conventional support model, employees’ tech problems take an average of three days to fix, since the service desk must address even routine issues by hand. Given the urgency of developing the company’s cancer treatments, Miller’s team began searching for an equally innovative way to provide IT help at scale, day or night, and in real time.
“We were a one-drug, one-location company for almost 20 years, so there wasn’t as great a need to mature our IT operations,” Miller said. “We’re now a three-drug, multiple-location company in high-growth mode, which makes modernizing and scaling our employee support a top priority.”
Of course, modernizing a multibillion-dollar company is easier said than done, particularly given the legacy systems that Seagen had in place. When Miller started her tenure at the firm, she was faced with an IT environment where “nothing was in the cloud” and “everything had to be manually updated” — making digital transformation a tall order. But beyond the challenge of implementing cloud services and AI-powered automation, Miller’s team also had to prove the value of such new technologies to a skeptical workforce.
The Solution
Seagen’s IT cost reduction strategy: conversational AI
In March 2019, Seagen deployed Moveworks — better known to the company’s employees as Dr. Botson. Moveworks is an AI solution that instantly resolves tech problems and policy questions: Employees simply tell Dr. Botson what they need using conversational language, and the bot handles the rest. Now, IT issues from resetting passwords to requesting software licenses to troubleshooting devices get fixed right away, directly on Microsoft Teams.
For Miller, one of the primary advantages of Moveworks was its ability to deliver end-to-end resolution, thanks to deep integrations with other systems at Seagen. By communicating with Okta, for instance, Dr. Botson can provision software without any button-clicking from the service desk — and without any delay for the employee who requested the tool.
Dr. Botson is currently addressing about 1,000 questions every month for Seagen employees. Moveworks’ Semantic Search maps these questions to the precise answer in the company’s knowledge base — providing just the right paragraph rather than linking to a long article. Multiplying that time savings by tens of thousands of tech issues, Miller says, has allowed Seagen to buy back 60,000 hours of productivity and save over one million dollars per year.
Moveworks has reduced our IT service costs by over one million dollars per year. It definitely pays for itself — and then some.
The Result
Modernizing IT is just the beginning
Moveworks has reshaped every facet of the IT support process at Seagen. For employees, satisfaction with the IT team has skyrocketed, since Dr. Botson resolves a third of all tech issues autonomously. But perhaps more importantly on the operations side, Miller has found that the bot empowers her team to offload routine issues to “focus on more impactful work” — such as tackling the inefficiencies that Moveworks itself identifies.
Beyond the growing number of use cases that Moveworks handles directly, Dr. Botson has transformed the sentiment around AI in general. Miller noted that “when people realize they can resolve their IT issues without waiting for a human to help, they start to expect it in other areas.” That’s why, for Seagen, IT support is only the beginning of a powerful partnership with Moveworks.
Key Integrations
