AI development with people first

Evolver implemented a GenAI service description assistant that reduces staff workload, streamlines the reading of service contracts, and brings financial benefits by making information about billable work easily accessible. The joint pilot demonstrated to ISS the possibilities of artificial intelligence.

Staying at the cutting edge

As a company, ISS wants to be at the forefront of progress. With so much happening in AI, they knew they had to act. Evolver was chosen as the project partner thanks to its prior experience and AI expertise. An agile approach suited ISS well.

“We didn’t want to sit around wondering; we decided to start doing and experimenting. That has proved to be a good tactic,” says Jenni Heinisuo, Chief Information Officer at ISS Palvelut Oy.

She says the project aimed to identify the opportunities and key benefits AI offers the organization, and to assess the amount of work the change would entail.

“We wanted to examine the change AI brings to ISS and evaluate its opportunities and impact on the organization’s ways of working. It was important for us to determine how such a major change could be implemented efficiently. At the same time, we wanted to make sure everyone in the organization was on board and would benefit from the change.”

Broad impact comes from involving the whole organization in the transformation

They didn’t want to leave the development effort within IT alone; to ensure the widest possible impact, the entire organization was involved in the transformation.

“We quickly realized that what matters even more than the technology is engaging people and embedding the change in everyday work. The goal isn’t just to try out an AI tool, but to ensure everyone understands its significance and is equipped to use it to improve their daily work,” Heinisuo says, and continues:

“In large organizations, change has traditionally taken a long time, but now we’re aiming for a more agile, faster approach that still delivers meaningful results.”

The many initial ideas were distilled into two solutions that would benefit the business and scale broadly, and the team decided to pilot a Service Description Assistant.

“We wanted to see business benefits, which weighed heavily in the decision,” Heinisuo explains.

“Both of the remaining ideas targeted as wide a potential user base in the company as possible. Many of the original ideas created value for support functions, but with these we realized they could be solutions available all the way to field staff,” adds Sami Öfverberg, Head of IT Customer Engagement, responsible for business IT solutions.

The Service Description Assistant makes reading contracts easier

In an organization with thousands of customers and employees, you need effective tools to ensure services are delivered to customers as agreed.

With the Service Description Assistant, ISS employees can look up what the services include for their cleaning and property maintenance sites.

Alongside financial benefits, the aim was to standardize disparate ways of working and reduce workload.

“If an employee has been unsure whether a given task is covered by the contract, they have typically directed the question to their supervisor, who in turn has forwarded it to billing or contract management—in other words, the clarification has been quite manual and passed through many hands,” Öfverberg explains.

“In a way, people have been kept busy at multiple layers much more than is reasonable,” Heinisuo adds.

Insights drive progress

During the project they gained valuable insights both into data management and into how positively the project was received. The familiar findings concerned incompletely captured contract data and the timeliness of documentation.

“In the past, the main goal was simply to get the documentation in order. Now we also want to make it visible,” Heinisuo sums up.
“I was initially a bit skeptical, because based on earlier trials I’ve learned that rolling out new tools is not always as easy as PowerPoint would have you believe. I was pleasantly surprised at how much those who used the tool benefited from it. It exceeded expectations,” Öfverberg comments.

During the pilot, the target group broadened significantly: the GenAI assistant, originally designed for supervisors, also proved useful for streamlining employees’ day-to-day operational work.

“The pilot group interpreted the assistant as a tool for employees, allowing them to independently verify whether a given task is included in the contract. That way, supervisors didn’t need to be burdened with queries. So the target group we had in mind changed completely and unexpectedly along the way,” Heinisuo says.

Öfverberg is pleased that the experiment has brought more than just a new AI tool: “It creates motivation to improve documentation when the information is actually put to use. Previously, contract management handled these matters in the background, but now the responsibility for maintaining documentation rests with the user’s supervisor. As a by-product we’ve launched a documentation improvement project.”

Evolver’s CEO, Arttu Kataja, says the technical insights related primarily to data processing. The thousands of PDF files in the material were turned into a usable form by trialing dozens of technical approaches:

“In the GenAI projects of the coming years, the challenge will be how to efficiently process diverse PDF material, both digital and scanned.”

Heinisuo is pleased that the material could be utilized more extensively than expected: “We were pleasantly surprised that, in addition to digitally created PDFs, we were able to include PDFs scanned from paper copies. Evolver clearly put in a lot of work there, but from our perspective it came across as agile.”

Joint experiments make the possibilities visible

Experiments done together help organizations see both the possibilities and the challenges of GenAI. The service assistant produced by the project was not the goal in itself; building it was a way to reveal how to work.

“We wanted to find out what kind of skills and time a project like this requires, and what kind of environment it should be built in—whether we do it in-house or together with a partner. Our goal was to understand what we need to factor in during this development so that it is as agile as promised,” Heinisuo explains, and continues:

“It was important to identify the cornerstones in this project on which we can continue to build similar demos and further streamline our processes.”

According to Heinisuo, in addition to strategic insight the project provided a view into the real possibilities of using AI:

“We gained an understanding of what this means in practice. We saw what it is beyond PowerPoint. This is a major transformation that needs to be communicated in an understandable way. As long as we rely only on PowerPoint decks, the communication is somewhat artificial. But when we can speak through a real solution and our own experience, credibility grows.”

Evolver is an agile and expert partner

Evolver’s deep expertise in applying GenAI technology to solve business needs, seamless collaboration, and quality of execution earn praise from the client.

We were quickly able to confirm that we were focusing on the right things and doing the right things. That was the most important factor and it guided the partnership,” Heinisuo says.
“At Evolver, the broad understanding of their own domain and work extends all the way up to senior management. They can answer questions that call for detailed knowledge, which shows how thoroughly they’ve immersed themselves in the subject. Their expertise isn’t just theory; it’s grounded in real experience and hands-on experiments, which has given me strong confidence in their capabilities,” Öfverberg says.

In addition to expertise, their rapid responses to client questions and the agility and ease of collaboration are equally impressive.

“If in meetings we asked whether something could be done a certain way, the answer was on the table within a couple of hours. We barely had time to formulate a problem before there was already a solution. The practicalities were handled very nimbly,” Heinisuo is pleased to note.

“Agility is definitely Evolver’s strength. We can make course corrections and even small tweaks very quickly. That has been really great. In addition to technical expertise, communication and bouncing ideas around is effortless,” Öfverberg says.