Volkswagen Group of America is the North American operation headquarters and subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group, which is comprised of 16 brands producing a variety of cars, motorcycles and commercial vehicles.

Volkswagen uses sophisticated robotic automation in direct manufacturing processes. By contrast, the indirect and administrative processes are yet to be automated on a large scale. With a workforce of over 600,000 employees, roughly 400,000 workers spend much of their day executing repetitive tasks.

Our Cognitive Enterprise Software Robots, referred to as softbots, take over manual work a human is performing on a computer and act as an intelligent co-worker.

For example, a Volkswagen Logistics Specialist spends several hours a day contacting suppliers to ensure all deliveries arrive on time. An employee must continuously look up shipments in a spreadsheet and compare the expected delivery date with the current date.

If the expected delivery date is five days or less away, the employee must send a reminder email to the supplier that the shipment has not arrived yet.

Using a technique called deep learning, our softbots learn a business process and execute it on the human’s behalf. The employee is now able to focus on more complex tasks.

Our softbots use a recurrent neural network to predict future clicks in a click stream. Utilizing natural language processing, the bots parse emails and then perform the appropriate actions.