How AI‑Powered Digital Employees Transform IT Operations and Boost Efficiency

With the rapid development of AI technology, building digital employees is significant for optimizing enterprise human resources, digital transformation, and improving work efficiency. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) Software Development Center has packaged AI systems with personalities to launch the digital employee “Ruan Xiaoyan,” exploring new collaborative modes between digital and natural humans, and integrating business with technology. This article introduces the application of digital employees in the operations field.

1. Functions of Digital Employees

Creating a digital employee starts with analyzing its functions. Leveraging machine learning, big data, and AI, digital employees emerge as anthropomorphic workers with high efficiency, strong capability, high controllability, and low cost. They can reduce staff while increasing output, reshaping the operations workforce. By examining pain points in operations management, daily office work, and human resources, the team identified key scenarios such as intelligent Q&A, resource locating, smart reminders, surveys, and intelligent work.

2. Touchpoints of Digital Employees

The next step is deciding how users will interact with the digital employee. Respecting user habits, the most common channel—instant messaging (IM) on PC and app—was chosen as the primary touchpoint, with a dedicated identity and unified authentication. Both 2D and 3D avatars were created, allowing users to send voice or text messages via IM to receive services. Additional channels such as email, phone, SMS, and a web plugin were also integrated to embed the digital employee into various business systems.

3. Specific Applications

1. Intelligent Customer Service

In operations, common pain points include quickly locating personnel during incidents and retrieving application configuration information. By building a knowledge graph on a graph database, scattered data (people, applications, CMDB configurations) are linked into a semantic network with reasoning capabilities. User queries are parsed, intents matched, and templated queries sent to the graph engine, delivering precise answers via voice or text. This enables fast problem localization and reduces the need to log into multiple systems.

Examples include asking for application information, department details, or hierarchical relationships such as “Who is X’s manager?” The digital employee also integrates NLP and Elasticsearch to provide single‑turn or multi‑turn Q&A, reducing the workload of operations staff.

2. Smart Work

Repetitive operational tasks—such as server requests, VPN provisioning, or firewall activation—can be delegated to the digital employee. By granting appropriate role permissions in target systems and coupling with RPA, the digital employee can automatically process approved tickets, e.g., opening firewall ports or creating VPN accounts, even during remote‑work scenarios like a pandemic.

Additionally, the digital employee offers quick entry points for common requests. Users can simply say “Open firewall” and receive a pre‑filled request page. It also handles simple commands like “Book a meeting room tomorrow morning” or “Check server status,” interpreting intent, invoking relevant systems, and completing the task. Complex commands trigger multi‑turn dialogs to gather necessary details.

3. Intelligent Reminder

Operational alerts of varying severity are pushed to responsible personnel via app notifications, IM messages, email, SMS, or even phone calls for critical issues. The digital employee also provides personal reminders for meetings, trainings, and other tasks, aggregating information from multiple channels into daily briefings.

When a meeting invitation is sent, the digital employee parses the email, extracts time, location, and attendees, creates a calendar reminder, and sends pre‑meeting alerts through various channels. It can also push routine notices such as duty schedules, inspection plans, or safety acknowledgments, allowing recipients to confirm receipt with a single click.

4. Summary

As AI technologies like ChatGPT mature, digital employees will expand their service scope across intelligent customer service, process automation, operational efficiency, internal management, and risk control. They will become more professional and human‑like, lowering usage barriers and fostering efficient human‑machine collaboration. After nearly a year of development, ICBC’s digital employee “Ruan Xiaoyan” integrates multiple AI capabilities, accumulates extensive data and knowledge, connects various office and operations systems, and serves over 5,000 daily users, becoming an indispensable assistant. Ongoing research aims to enable the digital employee to handle even more repetitive and creative tasks, freeing operations staff for higher‑value work.