Our expert consultants are now AI powered

From water consultancy and engineering to climate resilience and port projects, our in-house consultants continue a 140-year tradition of advising clients on the best approaches to solving problems and completing projects. 

As Haskoning has grown, so has our knowledge base. But ensuring everyone has access to the same knowledge and can learn from best practices is always a challenge. So how can we make sure over a century’s worth of know-how is spread across all our experts and client engagements?

Our digital team has been hard at work behind the scenes, creating a tool that compiles all of that knowledge, ensuring everyone can work from the same playbook and deliver the best advice to our clients.

AutoMate is an AI-powered tool that collates information from across the organisation and allows consultants to access it easily and quickly from a chatbot. 

Edward van Dijk, Head of Research and Development for our Nereda technology, and Jorrit Bock, our Digital Solutions Consultant, explain what this tool means for us and our clients. 

The inspiration for innovation

The AutoMate tool was first developed for consultants working with our Nereda solution, a biological wastewater treatment technology that leverages the power of aerobic granular sludge.

“Ten years ago, the Nereda team used to contained about fifteen people, and we’d maybe do one project a year. At that scale, knowledge could be shared in coffee corners,” says van Dijk.

“Now we have more than 100 colleagues working on Nereda, and more than a thousand people working with the technology outside of the organisation, so we needed a way to collate and share expertise and best practices freely – you can’t have a coffee with a thousand people.”

We currently have hundreds of thousands of documents related to Nereda in our SharePoint, so AutoMate was created to be a central repository for all of this information. It now contains memos, reports, webinars, meeting transcripts, technical manuals, and more. All of which is parsed at lightning speed by AI. 

With AutoMate, our consultants can ask the chatbot any question they have and are met with immediate answers. As an extra level of verification, the bot also shares the sources it’s pulled information from, so our experts can verify answers and ensure their accuracy.  

“You can’t build knowledge by everyone setting out to read a million documents,” says van Dijk. “What’s great about AI is that it can rapidly read and understand all of that information, and that provides an incredibly powerful starting point for knowledge transfer.” 

The benefits of democratisation

With AutoMate, our consultants can provide end clients with better guidance, more quickly. This leads to a range of benefits, from better products and designs to the improved overall performance of operations and processes. 

It’s particularly useful for making key decisions, because the results of all previous decisions are available to explore.
“We have quite a consistent workflow for the beginning of our engagements,” says van Dijk. “But when things deviate from that path and get more complicated, this tool can be really important in finding the best resolutions.” 

Internally, AutoMate means we’re confident that all of our consultants are providing the best advice even in the most complicated circumstances, which means we can provide greater consistency across the organisation. We’re also able to onboard new colleagues more quickly and bring them up to speed. 

The use of AutoMate now stretches well beyond Nereda, too. There are currently 14 instances running across Haskoning serving different business lines and advisory groups, each feeding from separate knowledge sources to provide tailored information. 

“There’s a lot of experimenting taking place right now to see how AutoMate can improve a range of processes, like permitting and tendering, all of which will add value to our clients later down the line,” says Bock.

“We now have a bot for geo-engineering, datacentres, HR, energy transition, and even for our digital teams – so the use cases and domains can vary greatly.” 

The future of knowledge sharing

As the AI landscape develops so quickly, it’s hard to say what other features and capabilities might be added to AutoMate, but our digital team has plans to extend its use beyond just our internal consultants.

“We’ve started working on chat bots that we can share with our clients, where we’ll hand-pick the relevant information to help them access knowledge quickly and easily,” says Bock. 

“By providing the tool to our clients and the end users of our products and services, we can give them direct access to our expertise, while still providing the human guidance they need when required.”