How an AI data solutions company captured critical knowledge during a transformation
Appen is a publicly listed company (ASX:APX) powering innovative AI applications for global brands such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Oracle, and more. Their expertise is in model tuning, validation, and benchmarking to ensure enterprise AI models enhance customer experience.
Appen underwent a restructuring process, transitioning engineering functions from one geography to another. They engaged Sugarwork to facilitate knowledge transfer across four technical domains.
“While implementing Sugarwork’s knowledge transfer platform at Appen, we witnessed a remarkable transformation in our onboarding process. It played a pivotal role in reducing onboarding time by 70% through the sharing of knowledge across a global team of 100 engineers in a matter of weeks. This platform was an invaluable asset, enabling us to seamlessly bridge geographical gaps and get to deep, tribal knowledge even in areas we had not had visibility over that were critical to Appen.”
Mo Chahdi, Global Vice President, Employee Experience
The Challenge
An IDC report suggests that Fortune 500 companies lose a combined $31.5 billion per year from employees failing to share knowledge effectively. By trying to recreate the wheel, repeating others’ mistakes, or wasting time searching for specialized information or expertise, employees incur productivity costs and opportunity costs for the organization.
While formal systems might help communicate established best practices, they often don’t explain how an individual should apply them to their own work.
Appen’s Engineering organization faced this very challenge of transitioning a number of technical roles, spanning machine learning, DevOps, data science and quality assurance over a span of just 6 weeks and involving over 100 engineers. Past knowledge sharing efforts had limited impact due to their manual nature. Appen needed a scalable and structured process to transfer knowledge especially as the business had to keep running.
The Solution: Sugarwork’s AI-powered platform made Appen’s transition seamless
With Sugarwork, Appen employees were able to scalably transfer knowledge on a secure and automated platform, utilizing generative AI to capture insights. Integration with Microsoft Teams meant that employees could easily launch meetings through the Sugarwork platform.
Experts and learners were paired on the platform
Through the platform, Appen leaders paired experts and learners based on roles and functional expertise. Each pair were asked to complete sessions over the course of 6 weeks.
Tailored templates drove high quality conversations
Expert-developed questions were deployed for each pair, spanning topics such as roles and responsibilities, and technical architecture. This enabled insights extraction from deep conversations.
Conversations recorded, transcribed and summarized
Over a 6-week period, participants conducted over 250 sessions on Microsoft Teams that were seamlessly captured and summarized with ChatGPT for later reference, allowing participants to focus on having high-quality conversations.
Knowledge accessed using conversational AI
New employees interact with captured knowledge in two key ways: (1) via an onboarding wayfinding document that was automatically generated by Sugarwork’s LLM; and (2) a conversational interface powered by ChatGPT to pinpoint critical information for success.
Track progress throughout the organization
Appen leaders were able to track the progress of each group throughout the course of the time period, and quickly assess if key topics were covered or pairs should be switched up.
“Sugarwork surfaced a shift in our culture. It wasn’t just about sharing knowledge, it allowed our employees to deepen relationships both within their current teams, and across functional areas during a period of transformational change.”
Andrea Clayton, Chief People Officer
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