Talla
The Convergence of Knowledge and Robotic Process Automation

Based in Boston, MA, Talla is a company that builds AI-powered products to bring business teams into the future of automation and insights.

While conversing with the CIO Applications’ editorial team, Rob May, CEO of Talla shares his insights on the company’s journey, solutions, and the value proposition they bring to the clients.

On the pain points that led to the formation of Talla

People are always looking to automate their routine work. By automating that work, we help people spend more time doing the work they enjoy, and that makes them more creative. We help them automate that work through digital workers.

We are in a unique position in the market. We are creating an environment at the intersection of knowledge and Robotic Process Automation (RPA).That being said, Talla is more than just a simple chatbot; we are an automation platform that utilizes chatbots and NLP to automate knowledge management at organizations.

We talked to numerous organizations that were struggling to keep employees informed with relevant information. Talla can currently be used to automate the knowledge organization and verification process. Talla can be used to create dynamic content pages. For instance, if you are writing an internal FAQ document on your product that you don’t have all the information for, Talla can reach out to other people in your organization to have them contribute content. Talla then takes care of organizing that content and validating it. Talla will also take care of proactively reaching out to ensure that content is up to date to prevent information from going stale. Talla integrates with a company’s chat platform, so employees can simply send Talla a message via Slack, Microsoft Teams, or TallaChat to get instant access to the information they’re looking for.

Other ways that Talla can be used include onboarding new employees, policy and procedure management, and more. With onboarding, the different steps that have to be completed in the process can be quickly achieved with Talla as it leverages AI. The Talla platform uses machine learning to surface relevant information in the right context to the new employee. As new hire information gets added or evolves, Talla continually updates that information so that new employees get the latest and most relevant information.

Today, we have broadened our horizons around knowledge management. The unique thing about Talla is that we provide a platform that automates all your work around knowledge.

What are the methodologies that you follow to understand the client’s requirements?

We have different deployment models depending on the needs of the organization. You can deploy Talla by simply going to www.talla.com online. We’ll spend time understanding a company’s knowledge needs to ensure the maximum success in deployment.

What keeps your company at the edge of the game?

We believe that digital workers like Talla are the future of work. As employees can automate their monotonous work, it frees them up to focus on more important tasks. Our smart knowledge base product is the first digital worker we’ve launched, and we have plans to launch additional ones in 2018. Talla provides a better knowledge discovery process by utilizing cutting-edge AI techniques that include semantic matching, machine translation, active learning, and topic modeling.

Tell us about a situation where Talla was instrumental in addressing a key challenge faced by a client.

One Fortune 100 company we worked with had an onboarding problem. New employees were having a hard time getting up to speed with company information and management was too busy to devote enough time to the process.

At this point, the firm approached us to improve the onboarding process. They used Talla to organize their onboarding materials and deliver them to new employees when the information was relevant to them. So, rather than an employee getting 20 pieces of new information on day one of the job, they got them delivered over the course of weeks when the information was more meaningful to them. They were walked through the onboarding process with Talla. They also used Talla to automate answering internal questions, giving employees the ability to self-serve information.

A peek inside the work culture at Talla

At Talla, we hire interesting, unique people with varied backgrounds.We have a senior management team with extensive experience in enterprise software, AI, and advanced data science techniques. Our strength through the years has been the team, and that is one of the primary forces that drive the company forward.

Our DNA is “enterprise”. We go by the philosophy of “be a grownup” because contrary to the culture in most companies, we want to work, innovate, experiment and in the process deliver value to the customers.

The next big thing for Talla

We will launch additional digital workers aimed at automating work processes for businesses. We will connect more systems and move from automation around knowledge to the idea of broader workflow orchestration for more complex operations.