Cases & Voices

The boom of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the countless possibilities it opens up in the world of research and education inevitably brought an important question: How can National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) practically benefit from this technology revolutionizing the world? Among the many possible answers, a project from the Brazilian network, RNP, offers an exciting path: the virtual assistant Ipezinho.

Launched in 2019, Ipezinho, a unique AI-based virtual assistant, has revolutionized the service delivery to institutions connected to the Brazilian network. It interacts with clients in multiple languages, provides answers related to general services, and opens tickets to activate service analysts across all RNP’s digital service channels, such as the website and social media.

“We are dealing with a customer profile that no longer wants to send emails or make phone calls, nor wait hours or days to be attended to.  The new generation is looking for speed and efficiency when it comes to solving their problems. In 2019, with the chatbot boom and when no one was yet talking about AI or ChatGPT, we decided to invest in a tool based on these technologies. That’s how Ipezinho was born, which handles 30% of RNP’s customer service demand today,” explains Francisco Junior, Integrated Service Manager at the Brazilian network. Ipezinho, named after the Rede Ipê (as the RNP backbone is known in Brazil), virtually solves many of the issues related to the Brazilian National Network’s service portfolio. “These include eduroam, CAFÉ (identity federation service), authentication, and connectivity services. When a user institution is disconnected from the network, the person in charge can open a ticket directly through Ipezinho, speak quickly with one of the analysts, and monitor the progress of their request in real-time”, Junior explains.

Another function of the chatbot is to answer questions from network users, in a service model very similar to what ChatGPT offers today. To do this, the Integrated Services Team, led by Francisco Junior, connected Ipezinho to an OpenAI API (the company that created ChatGPT) which reads and learns to answer questions based on RNP’s database, of more than 10,000 knowledge items. “Users can ask absolutely anything related to the universe of RNP services and get an instant answer. To give you an idea of the solution’s effectiveness, 50% of our Web Conference service requests are already solved this way”, he adds.

In terms of numbers, Ipezinho handled about 5,000 calls in the first half of 2023. According to RNP’s Integrated Service Manager, the chatbot’s average accuracy is 90%, and the average satisfaction rating for Ipezinho’s service is 4.4/5.

OpenAI’s features were added to the chatbot last year to keep Ipezinho up-to-date and increasingly efficient and to meet the demands of a generation increasingly eager for practicality and speed. “We are constantly working to develop the tool and stay at the forefront. In Silicon Valley, people say that great companies are born from the tripod of ‘money, knowledge, and rebellion.’ We didn’t have enough money, but we had some knowledge and rebellion. The truth is that when we started using OpenAI, the cost was very low, and it was more important to have the courage to think outside the box and take something that was only used for personal purposes on apply it on an organizational scale.” This continuous improvement ensures that Ipezinho will always be at the cutting edge of technology.

Award-Winning Initiative

The fruits of this boldness have been abundant. In addition to providing multiple costumer benefits, in 2022, Francisco Junior’s team won the “Best Support Team in Brazil” award at the HDI International Institute’s Trophy for Ipezinho. In the 2023 edition of the same event, RNP’s chatbot was awarded “Best Virtual Assistant in Brazil,” beating virtual assistants from companies the size of Petrobras, the Brazilian oil giant. “Receiving these awards was very gratifying for us, because we realized that we could provide our students, our researchers, and our entire academic network with services that are among the best. Some people think public services don’t have to be high quality. We think the opposite! We can and should offer high quality service. It’s not just a matter of money; it’s about processes and putting the end-user at the center of what we do,” says the manager.

Another important victory for the team that created Ipezinho is that, for the past eight years, the team and its services have been audited by HDI, obtaining top marks in areas such as process and leadership, placing RNP among the top 20 audited companies in Brazil in terms of customer service. “For me, this is proof that we, as academic networks in Latin America and the Caribbean, can be the best in our countries and a reference for other companies and networks worldwide,” concludes Francisco Junior.

In the case of RNP and Ipezinho, this is already a reality. In September, representatives from the Brazilian network will visit the facilities of MoreNET, the academic network of Mozambique, to train their teams in using the virtual assistant so that institutions in that country can also benefit from the technology that has so profoundly changed the world in recent years.