Sprout, an AI chatbot that freed about 1,000 staff hours a year
The most common questions coming into IASourceLink were the same ones, asked again and again. Sprout answers them in seconds and routes the rest to the right agency.
- IASourceLink
- Program Coordinator, UNI John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center
1,000 hrs
of staff time freed per year
Seconds
to answer routine questions, down from hours or days
Context
IASourceLink receives a steady stream of licensing questions from people starting businesses. Most are variations on the same handful of questions, and each one took a staff response measured in hours or days.
Problem
Repetitive questions consumed staff time that should have gone to the partner network and to harder problems. The volume also meant slow answers for people who often just needed to know which form, or which agency.
Approach
Automate the repeat work, not the judgment. Sprout was trained on government licensing content so it could answer routine questions directly. Anything complex was routed to the correct agency rather than guessed at. In parallel, analytics on what visitors actually searched for shaped a library of how-to guides, so many answers became self-service before a question was ever asked.
Systems built
- Sprout
- An AI chatbot trained on government licensing content and deployed on the platform.
- Agency routing logic
- Complex questions are routed to the agency that owns the answer instead of being answered wrong.
- How-to guide library
- Built from search analytics, so it covers what people were actually looking for.
Results
Routine questions are answered in seconds instead of hours or days. Roughly a thousand hours a year of staff time moved from answering repeat questions to partner relationship work, which is the higher-value use of a one-person team.
What I took from it
Routing mattered as much as answering. A chatbot that guesses at a licensing question does damage. One that knows when to hand off earns trust.
IASourceLink receives a steady stream of licensing questions from people starting businesses. Most are variations on the same handful of questions, and each one took a staff response measured in hours or days.
Routine questions are answered in seconds instead of hours or days. Roughly a thousand hours a year of staff time moved from answering repeat questions to partner relationship work, which is the higher-value use of a one-person team.