Enterprise chatbot platform
From zero to a company-wide chatbot for the Schwarz Group
- Company
- Schwarz IT (now Schwarz Digits)
- Role
- Software Engineer & Tech Lead
- Place
- Neckarsulm
- GoLive
- December 2019
I started this project on my own at the end of 2017 - with support from DFKI Berlin (the German Research Center for AI) - and grew a small team around it. We built a comprehensive, company-wide chatbot platform from scratch and took it live in December 2019.
01The chatbot platform
A modern web app: a React frontend with a Java Spring Boot + Oracle SQL backend. The platform was connected to many enterprise systems - SharePoint, ARIS, ServiceNow, an IoT platform - and to the corporate IdP via OAuth.
We developed and ran a hybrid NLU: rule-based plus machine learning (Microsoft LUIS).
Shortly after go-live, all of the group's chatbot initiatives were merged, and I moved into a solution-architect role for new use cases and features.
02My role
Beyond frontend and backend work packages, I owned the technical lead, the system design and a lot of stakeholder management - requirements engineering and workshops with internal customers, plus collaboration with infrastructure, data privacy and information security.
We operated the bot ourselves on Linux VMs behind Apache, with ServiceNow for ticketing and Azure DevOps + Git for repos and management.