TALAN: Delivering faster, higher‑quality responses to customer requests by using AI to search a historical knowledge base
Accessing collective experience to design the best solutions
Each day, staff at the support center of technology and consulting company and SAP partner TALAN respond to hundreds of customer requests. To provide a faster, more efficient service with enriched responses, the company deployed SAP Business AI to assist consultants in searching historical cases in the company’s knowledge base.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| High tech | Paris, France | 7,000 employees |
historical client cases searched in seconds.
of past requests located using semantic capabilities.
Innovation and Offering Director, TALAN
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| High tech | Paris, France | 7,000 employees |
historical client cases searched in seconds.
of past requests located using semantic capabilities.
Innovation and Offering Director, TALAN
Supporting clients’ digital transformations with AI-based solutions
International consulting group TALAN is an SAP gold partner, helping customers in more than 27 countries tackle complex challenges and supporting them as they embark on digital transformations. At the heart of the company’s operations is a support center where more than 100 experts handle more than 250 client requests each day.
For each new client request, the experts refer to a knowledge base of more than 140,000 historical cases, analyzing similar needs and using the information to optimize the quality of their responses. However, using classic text search functionality based on keywords led to an abundance of results that could be counterproductive.
As a champion of using AI to solve its customers’ problems, TALAN turned to the technology to enhance the search process. The company wanted to develop a search engine that would use AI to not only search for keywords but also pinpoint relevant cases based on the overall context of the request.
Using AI to compare the context of request tickets
TALAN decided to use SAP Business AI to create an AI-assisted solution that would compare the context of historical and current requests as part of “Project S.P.A.R.K.”. With model versioning, audit logs, and security controls that matched TALAN’s compliance requirements, enterprise-grade governance was a key factor in the decision to use SAP software.
The project team worked closely with experts at SAP to build the AI-enabled solution, using the SAP AI Core infrastructure and the generative AI hub capability in SAP Core AI, which provide harmonized and compliant access to generative AI in SAP Business Technology Platform. Integrating tightly with the SAP HANA Cloud vector engine, the solution searches TALAN’s knowledge base and retrieves semantically similar tickets before surfacing the results in the same knowledge‑base interface based on SAP S/4HANA that consultants already use.
Now, instead of typing keywords into a classic full-text search that returns hundreds of hits, staff at TALAN’s support center simply write a short description of the new request. The solution then lists the top five most relevant historical tickets, with an AI-generated summary of each that highlights key actions and suggests next steps.
SAP Consultant and Team Leader, TALAN
Focusing on analysis and innovation
Using AI to find relevant past tickets is resulting in considerable time savings for the consultants working in TALAN’s support center. Now, instead of spending up to four minutes to search for a ticket using multiple keyword iterations, the AI-based solution provides them with relevant matches in around 30 seconds.
Instead of sifting through hundreds of irrelevant results and then writing draft responses from scratch, consultants have an AI-curated summary as a starting point. This means they can spend more time focusing on analyzing the customer request and designing innovative solutions to meet their requirements. By reducing the length of the research phase and finding historical similarity, the AI-based solution also enables search results to be more relevant and focused on the customer context of cases handled.
Innovation and Offering Director, TALAN
Expanding the use of AI to further enhance response handling
TALAN sees its use of SAP Business AI as key to its ability to deliver fast, high-quality support and to grow its AI-based services portfolio. The software is also enabling the company to achieve the high levels of customer satisfaction and renewals required to gain a competitive edge.
To further refine its services, TALAN is now pursuing a road map for expanding its use of AI with solutions based on SAP AI Core, the generative AI hub, and the SAP HANA Cloud vector engine. The team is currently working on a new AI-based predictive classification service to automatically route new tickets to the optimal expert group, with anticipated savings on triage time and fewer rerouting issues. Plans also include root cause analysis of historical tickets to find common issues and suggest systematic fixes.