Mike HeapMike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.
Created time
Oct 4, 2023 08:03 AM
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Image
Publish date
Sep 11, 2023
Slug
3form-shield-most-valuable-employees-from-repetitive-questions
Featured
Featured
Type
Case study
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Ready to Publish
3form uses My AskAI to shield their most valuable employees from repetitive questions and improve their documentation at the same time
- 3form crafts sophisticated, handcrafted designs, leveraging 3d printing to create exquisite architectural products
- They operate in a highly technical space, with lots of jargon and processes that are hard to comprehend for the non-technical side of the business
- By creating an AskAI with their documentation they were able to alleviate pressure and questions on the technical team members, get faster answers and identify inconsistencies in their processes
- They are now looking to roll out My AskAI business-wide and improve their internal documentation
What does 3form do?
3form crafts sophisticated, handcrafted, translucent materials that harness form, texture, light, and color, they use a team of thinkers, designers, and engineers combined with digital printing techniques to ethically and sustainably create beautiful, functional objects in America.
They have been operating for 20 years in a highly technical, ever-changing space meaning they (and their employees) need to constantly adapt and learn to ensure they are able to push forward and grow as a business, this can be especially difficult when your team is distributed across several countries.
A steep learning (and relearning) curve
3form’s technology is proprietary, what they do and how they work can’t be read about outside of their company, and no AI was ever trained on their methods.
This means nobody new to the company will ever have prior knowledge or experience of their methods and techniques so every employee needs to upskill, in a very technical subject.
This is hard enough for the makers and engineers, but for less technical roles such as sales, marketing, and HR it Fais almost impossible.
Not only that but even for more technical roles, if you haven’t worked in an area for some time, things could have changed, and keeping up to date can be an issue.
This means you end up doing one of 2 things:
- A LOT of reading through PDFs, and CTRL+F-ing documents to try and decipher what you need to know to pass on to customers or others in the business
- Pestering the ‘wizards’ in the business who are the fountains of all knowledge - but they end up being the least productive due to the distraction and get spread thinly across projects
Creating an AI ‘wizard’
Keen to see how AI could help them Adam and Zeeshan from 3form started testing out My AskAI, uploading all of their technical documentation, usually only accessible from an Amazon S3 bucket from which you had to download the PDFs individually.
Once uploaded they used a redirect for their help page to their password-protected My AskAI share page so employees could easily access it and get answers to the majority of the questions whenever they needed them, in whatever language they wanted.
An unexpected answer
Instantly they were able to see the benefits with their team, reducing queries to the ‘wizards’ in the business and getting quicker responses to unblock issues.
“Now our team isn’t stuck searching through a million PDFs doing like CTRL+F on each one individually, praying a word is in it, we just get answers”
But then something strange happened, when they reviewed their analytics, their AI wasn’t giving the answer they expected. So they looked into the sources used to answer the question and realized their documentation itself had conflicting information, something that could have easily led to confusion or misinterpretation amongst employees had it not been picked up.
What next?
Adam and his team are in the process of rolling out My AskAI across their entire business by embedding it on their company’s CRM page and making it accessible to everyone.
They’re also learning more about their data and how it can be improved for the benefit of not just their AskAI but their business at large.
Finally, the biggest win of all is that their new AI ‘Wizard’ takes some pressure off the actual wizards in their business, meaning they can focus on 3form’s real magic.
