Tonkean has announced the release of a transformative new employee assistant called the Enterprise Copilot, which uses AI to empower teams and orchestration to unify processes that span many different systems and departments.
Tonkean is a first-of-its-kind intake orchestration platform. Powered by AI, Tonkean helps enterprise internal service teams like procurement and legal create process experiences that transform how businesses operate – in part by changing how internal teams leverage smart technology to empower the employees they serve to do better, higher value work.
The Enterprise Copilot builds on previous advancements from Tonkean in intake and orchestration. It enables internal teams like procurement, legal, and IT to anticipate employees’ needs, guide them through requests, and automate manual steps. It empowers those teams, in turn, to move at the speed of business and increase process adoption—all while eliminating the burdens of change management.
Ultimately, the Enterprise Copilot works behind the scenes to do everything employees want AI to do for them—the bureaucratic, back-office busywork—so they can focus more completely on creating unique, strategic value that drives the business forward.
Sagi Eliyahu, CEO at Tonkean, speaks exclusively to CPOstrategy and reveals how much of a game changer the introduction of Tonkean’s Enterprise Copilot actually is.
How big an announcement is this? What does this news mean for Tonkean and its customers?
Sagi Eliyahu: “Very big. It seems like every SaaS company—including intake and orchestration companies—is announcing AI capabilities. But those tools haven’t quite cut it. Employees in the enterprise are still spending 50% of their time hacking through corporate bureaucracy and manual work: filling forms, chasing follow ups, learning how to navigate other teams’ preferred systems because the AI can’t integrate with them—the ‘dishes’ of business work, basically.
“The great promise of AI, like software more broadly before it, was to elevate performance by freeing employees to focus more completely on the interesting, high-value work, and to leave the dishes to robots. We believe the Enterprise Copilot—which builds on our prior advancements in AI and orchestration—goes all the way, and gives enterprises technology that works for humans, rather than forcing humans to work for the tech. It actually eliminates busywork, rather than just shuffling the busywork around, and in a way that accommodates employees’ differing needs and preferences, because it can meet them where they like to work.”
One of the biggest draws of AI is the idea that it should enable users to focus on important, strategic things. In your view, firstly why do you think this is, and how much is Tonkean’s Enterprise Copilot changing the game?
Sagi Eliyahu: “Most of the new AI releases you’re seeing only help users navigate their own application. Applications adding chatbots to help users navigate their UI is not the change we seek. Instead, both your AI orchestration needs to sit above and work with your whole tech stack. That’s what the Enterprise Copilot does. Internal teams like procurement can use it to anticipate employees’ needs, guide them through requests, and, importantly, automate intelligent processes that span many different systems and departments. Among other things, this helps internal teams close adoption gaps. It eliminates the need for constant training and change management around processes.”
Can you describe how Tonkean’s Enterprise Copilot not only builds on previous advancements made in AI and orchestration such as ProcurementWorks, LegalWorks and ServiceWorks but advances the conversation? How is this efficiency being scaled?
Sagi Eliyahu: “The Enterprise Copilot incorporates many different AI-powered functionalities, including:
- An AI Front Door that can field, triage, and autonomously resolve plain-language inquiries over email, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and/or custom portals;
- AI-enhanced form sequences that use context and situational signals to personalise and pre-populate fields with data from connected systems;
- In-line AI Q&A that autonomously answers questions directly within form sequences;
- Human-in-the-loop collaboration that enables requesters to escalate in-line questions to specific functions or individuals to verify AI responses and provide additional support;
- Orchestration through end-to-end integration. You can automate handoffs across teams and applications, and notify stakeholders while enabling them to take action in their preferred environments, be it their core functional applications (e.g. procure-to-pay for procurement teams or enterprise legal management for legal teams) or in email, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.”
In your view, is this just the beginning?
Sagi Eliyahu: “Yes. Intelligence gained by—and performance improvements achieved through—more strategic use of AI and orchestration in the enterprise will beget more innovation and new learnings. The true potential of the Enterprise Copilot is to facilitate more powerful and human-centric ways of doing back-office work.
“That said, enterprises can leverage the Enterprise Copilot right now to move at the speed of business. The in-workflow AI and cross-system orchestration helps you resolve internal requests faster and more effectively. You can improve process adoption and compliance by providing process experiences that always meet stakeholders where they are and that eliminate the need for ongoing change management around new processes and systems. You can reduce human error by catching all the little snags that slow processes down before they become big problems.”
Anything you wish to add?
Sagi Eliyahu: “The bottom line is this – technology should work for humans, not force humans to work for it. AI and orchestration have done much to help enterprises integrate their applications, better manage complex processes, and make concrete progress to this end. But software’s great enterprise promise, which is to elevate performance at scale by freeing employees to focus completely on work for which they’re uniquely suited, remains unfulfilled. The Enterprise Copilot works behind the scenes to give corporations what they need to finally make good on that promise.”
