Panel discussion on Harnessing data for sustainable growth, at the HETiA Emerging Tech forum

During the HETiA Emerging Tech forum that took place on 9 December 2021 in a hybrid format, various insightful discussions took place. Stavros Vassos, Helvia Technologies Co-Founder & CEO participated at the panel Harnessing data for sustainable growth, discussing the impact of data in delivering value, with Kostas Tsagaris - Managing Director & Co-Founder  WINGS ICT Solutions, Mike Konstantinidis - CEO METIS Cyberspace Technology, Ioannis Michailidis - Marketing Director NEUROPUBLIC, with Moderator Giorgos Kourkoutas - Editor in Chief, Startupper Mag.

As Mr Kourkoutas mentioned in his introduction, the market for big data and data analysis is growing exponentially – from 200bn USD in 2020, the market is expected to grow to 600bn USD by 2030. Why is this happening? We’ve had huge amounts of data from various sources that were left unused, and now, with the development of technology, this data can be analyzed to deliver valuable information, show trends, and help companies and organizations to add more value out of it. This is why there is now huge development from startups in this field.

Stavros Vassos, introduced Helvia as a startup offering process automation solutions through digital assistants, aka chatbots, through which a user can chat and get automated answers. Helvia has also developed a no-code platform through which organizations can develop their own chatbots without coding skills, and also specializes in specific sectors, providing ready to use solutions, like an employee portal for HR.

Data is at the center of any chatbot

Describing the importance of data being at the center of Helvia’s activities from the foundation of the company, Stavros explained that to get a digital assistant to work, everything is based on data. When the company started, the mechanism that was set up was based on the collection and automated analysis of data so that Helvia could extract value and develop the appropriate solutions. In regards to data sources, for Helvia’s sector, the source is the person that gets in touch, the words, the phrases and the interaction with the digital assistant.

In terms of data processing there are two main categories:

  1. Natural Language Understanding - This has to do with the message that gets analyzed through various steps, so Helvia can extract the theme category it belongs to, some more specific information about the intent, and last, a sentiment value so we can understand if it had a positive or negative tone. An example is understanding if the user is talking about soccer or asking for annual leave and also gathering more specific information about this request, e.g. if they have asked for a leave, for which days that was.
  2. Process mining - This is another processing category that has to do with the flow of the conversation, i.e., the user journey, and provides information about whether it is in the beginning or towards the end of the discussion, if it goes well, or not. This is one of the processing techniques that nowadays gets great attention, because there is plenty of data and through this, very useful information is extracted that adds value to organizations about what their users do and want.

Helvia’s data management solutions through chatbots drive value for customers

Chatbots are used more and more in various sectors. Helvia aims at offering ready made solutions that can work with low or no code, so companies can benefit from chatbots and data processing even if they don't have in-house high tech expertise. This way, chatbots and data processing gives value to customers and strategic sustainability to Helvia.

As an example, something relevant to this period is a recent development of a digital assistant within the Microsoft Teams environment, which works as an employee portal. The digital assistant works as a middleman between the employee and the HR department, with the purpose to collect requests, give automated answers, inform HR, speed up the process and essentially save money for the organization.

How Helvia tackles the challenge of finding skilled personnel

Finding specialized personnel in Greece, even at an engineering level and not only for data science, has become a bit of a challenge lately. If a company has a good relationship with universities, there is a workforce that can be nurtured. Helvia, as a startup, invests in people who are in the beginning of their career and therefore more easy to reach as a way to sidestep this challenge.