Efficient order processing based on Microsoft Azure with AI from Workist, a participant in the Microsoft for Startups program

The challenge: Training the innovative software and bringing it to customers 

Founded only in 2019 and already geared up for a sales and distribution partnership with Microsoft: Workist shows how it’s done. “When we launched our company, we had hundreds of ideas,” recalls Tim Wegner, one of the startup’s three founders and two managing directors. “But there was one that really stood out. We noticed that at many companies, there was one area that offered considerable room for improvement. Order processing and order confirmation checks often tie up an enormous amount of employees’ time. A company can’t influence the form in which its suppliers or customers issue their administrative notifications, but it can learn to change the way it handles them,” Wegner says.

This is precisely where Workist comes in. The startup wanted to offer a solution that helped people speed up their order processing and make it more efficient. So Wegner and his team developed their own artificial intelligence assistant, WorKI, and set about training it. “We taught it to read and correctly analyze different document types, which took a great deal of time and effort,” Wegner says. Developing the AI assistant would prove both the startup’s core achievement as well as its biggest technical challenge. The system must be available and functional at all times. This hinges on having a scalable IT infrastructure that customers can quickly and easily integrate when the time comes. To pull this off and to bring its software to users, the fledgling company looked around for the right strategic and technology partner with a comprehensive sales network. Today, Workist collaborates closely on its sales and development activities with Microsoft through the Microsoft for Startups program.

The solution: Azure provides the high-performance technological basis, while Microsoft serves as strategic partner on an equal footing

The Azure cloud platform makes Workist as fast as the startup always dreamed of being for its customers. “What really made the difference were the efficient combination of WorKI and Azure, the straightforward connection to customer systems via Power Platform—especially with Power Automate—and the award of Azure credits,” Wegner says. It normally takes just one to three months to go from the initial contact with a customer to the software going live. And because connecting to customer systems is so straightforward, setup takes just an hour or two. “The scalable cloud platform means we can guarantee our customers a consistent product experience even when they’re growing fast. Since we switched to Azure, the volume of data our platform handles has increased by more than a thousand percent. And the software is just as responsive now as it was on day one,” says Fabian Brosig, CTO at Workist, enthusiastically.

Workists sales activities follow the principle of co-selling. Indeed, at the start of 2021, the company achieved Microsoft co-sell status in record time. Since then, Microsoft and Workist have been selling and enhancing the solution together. “It’s an unconventional, uncomplicated, and unbureaucratic collaboration,” Wegner says. “People all over the world regard Microsoft as a secure and trustworthy technology company. And the same goes for Azure as a cloud platform. This means, that our potential customers are happy to trust us from the start, too.” Equally, Microsoft benefits from its association with Workist, which offers a real innovation from the startup world—one that Microsoft customers find easy to use and that gives them a decisive edge. “The automated processing of documents—emails, PDFs, Excel lists—in real time, and the corresponding shortening of delivery times, makes companies more competitive,” Wegner explains. 

WorKI automates 95 percent of order processing. If the AI assistant is unsure how to proceed at any point, the human-in-the-loop principle ensures that an employee is automatically brought in to process the document manually. This enables WorKI to learn from the outcome, so that it will know what to do next time without human help. In the spirit of putting AI to work, more and more of these repetitive tasks are being performed by WorKI rather than by people. As part of the first co-sell deal between Microsoft and Workist, WorKI is processing an immense number of orders, tax statements, and property handover certificates for Deutsche Bahn AG. This is saving resources, not to mention sparing employees’ nerves.

WorKI for an intelligent future