Ankura AI Solutions

Summary

Ankura is a global team of subject matter experts and seasoned advisors with hard-earned industry knowledge, and is primed for this very moment, and for the future. Ankura engaged Design for People to substantially elevate their existing web frontend of their AI-powered applications on their Azure Open API environment.

The endeavor encompassed meticulous adherence to branding guidelines, an uplift in user experience and user interface, integration of functionalities, for the genesis of a cutting-edge multi-agent system for complex task execution and analysis. The Design for People team worked closely with Ankura’s AI team, stakeholders, and their clients to design and develop the user interface for their AI solutions.

Learn more about Ankura on their website.

Challenge

Ankura is a consulting firm that is well known for specializing in expert advisory services, and AI technology is relatively new – exploding the market over the last year. However, many firms are nowhere near the capability that Ankura’s Research and Development team has achieved and they’re advancing further every day. Operating like a high-end tech startup within a much larger strategic consulting firm, the team has been able to achieve advances in AI technology and strategic solutions to unique use cases unlike any other services firm or tech startup.

The most common challenges we faced stemmed from an overall discrepancy within a large userbase of the openness to use AI and familiarity of using it including how and why they would use it. While there are many AI power-users, however, there are many more non-AI users who don’t know where to start or how to best leverage AI in their day-to-day workflow. Our challenge was to design for early adopters, power users, those who have played around with ChatGPT outside of work or have not yet started using AI.

Project Approach

The user interfaces we designed for minimum viable product (MVP) and version 1 apps help educate users while encouraging user adoption by leveraging best practices in user experience. The user experience will evolve as users become more fluent with AI and user experience trends change over time.

The primary goal of our design approach was to create a user-centered experience that streamlines work processes and enhances client support by utilizing the conversation AI modal. We began by conducting user interviews and brainstorm sessions with power users at Ankura to gain a better understanding of their needs and challenges.

After our research phase, we collaborated with a cross-functional team of designers, developers, and data analysts to generate innovative solutions to meet user needs. This phase allowed us to gather valuable insights that would inform our design decisions. From these insights, we crafted user stories, user flows, and created wireframes to guide the design process. Multiple design iterations helped to refine the user interface, establish a cohesive style guide, and create high-fidelity screens. The cross-functional team collaborated through regular status updates and working sessions. The applications were developed responsively, tested, implemented, and deployed into the client production environment. User research is ongoing to adapt to user feedback and new functionality.

Three AI-powered applications available today are introduced here:

Conversational AI

Nora^GPT is a secure and collaborative generative-AI environment that enables your team to perform research and analysis and generate content with your data that is actionable and created for your firm’s specific needs. Its unique multi-cognitive agent system sets it apart and empowers businesses to uncover intelligent findings within their data swiftly, facilitating data-informed decision-making.

Computer Vision with AI Data Organization

Xtractor computer vision leverages AI to extract and process data from images and text in any condition and format it into usable structured data tailored to your specific needs and highlighting your desired data. Improves the accuracy of PII/PHI detection for cyber breeches or fraud investigation by enhancing text extraction from suboptimal formats, classification of specified data, and formatted data output for business processing or medical records.

Meeting Notes Analysis

Nora Notes leverages AI to summarize and process meeting transcriptions into meeting notes customized to user’s needs – whether you seek an executive summary with key points and action items, or more comprehensive details organized by key themes. Make the most of your company’s meetings with Nora Notes.

Conclusion and Results

These applications are currently deployed and in use by Ankura employees and their clients. New features are being designed and developed where the apps are evolving and growing in capabilities. We have received very positive feedback and excitement for the future enhancements and plethora of use cases where these applications provide the solutions to complex problems. We are continuing to support these enhancements and are also helping with product branding and the overall Ankura AI and Technology sub-brand visual style and messaging – case study coming soon.