Arthur D. Little maximizes human capital, scans complex documents in seconds with Azure AI services

Revolutionizing content search and knowledge management on a global scale

For more than 137 years, strategy management consulting firm Arthur D. Little has helped clients across multiple industries and competencies drive technology innovation to enhance their individual, industry-leading capabilities. The firm’s clients include the majority of the Fortune 500, and its workforce extends across 46 offices in 39 countries. Teams of consultants work with a giant and ever-growing wealth of data and documents, often unsorted and unstructured.

Arthur D. Little has been a long-term Microsoft-first organization internally, moving fully to the Microsoft Cloud in 2021 and using Microsoft 365 products across the business to encourage collaboration and innovation. Because experimentation is an integral part of Arthur D. Little’s corporate ethos, the firm decided to go beyond content search and use Microsoft technology to unlock its teams’ collective intelligence. Its leaders wanted to explore AI services from Microsoft because using them would reduce the need for new vendor investments and more services within its infrastructure. “We were surprised that Microsoft Azure offers such a breadth of advanced AI capabilities, like abstract summarization, which are way beyond even the specialist AI providers,” says Jon Nicholls, Global Chief Information Officer at Arthur D. Little.

Using primarily Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Cognitive Search, and Azure AI services, Arthur D. Little created and launched a game-changing AI solution to sort through and make sense of complex document formats. Used internally, the solution combines natural language processing with content and contextual searches of files from across the firm to help consultants quickly and easily access the information they need while maintaining strict data confidentiality. Also maximizing its human capital in the process, Arthur D. Little can simultaneously identify the best subject matter experts to team together and solve for its clients’ toughest challenges.

“We’ve used our Azure-based AI solution to answer questions that most organizations face. We now understand who we are, what we know, and where our value lies,” says Nicholls. “These are the principles of knowledge management put together in a much more advanced way than was previously possible.”

Supporting multiple languages and maximum confidentiality

As a global management consultancy, Arthur D. Little has valuable intellectual capital. However, this typically gets stored in complex data formats and multiple languages, making traditional content search methods less successful. The firm’s easy-to-use solution takes that unstructured data and brings it together in Azure with the explicit and embedded information stored in the firm’s internal SharePoint folders. The solution draws on text analytics and other AI enrichment capabilities in Azure AI services to improve indexing and deliver consolidated data insights. Consultants can also access summaries of documents generated by the abstractive summarization feature in Azure AI Language to quickly grasp key information without needing to review a full document.

“Using abstractive summarization in Azure AI Language was transformational, taking difficult document formats like 100-slide PowerPoint decks with fragmented text and images and immediately making them human readable and searchable,” says Nicholls, who notes the firm’s previous content search tools would find and pull a lot of XML code rather than actual content. “Abstractive summarization raised our teams’ excitement level over what we’d done because it introduces the ability to determine within seconds whether a document’s content is relevant.”

After deploying the initial solution in early 2023, Arthur D. Little became an early adopter of large language models through Azure OpenAI, choosing to use the service to enhance security. “A key differentiator for us in using Azure OpenAI is the ability to keep confidential client information from being used elsewhere for training or service improvement,” says Nicholls. “The inputs and responses don’t get shared because we only store them within our secure environment. We can also run data science routines to understand use patterns and assist with training models while providing the same abuse protection that Microsoft or OpenAI would independently.”

For added security, Arthur D. Little deployed the full Microsoft 365 E5 security stack, including Microsoft 365 Defender and Microsoft Intune, throughout the firm. It uses its heightened incident management abilities to quickly address any activity that appears beyond the baseline. This fosters a more agile and adaptive environment, which goes hand in hand with leading-edge recoverability through fully redundant and backed up services across the firm’s multiple geolocations and nodes in Azure.

Using Azure AI services to maximize years of collective intelligence

Since its cloud migration, Arthur D. Little’s infrastructure has been grounded in Windows Server virtual machines on Azure, allowing it to turn off any remaining VMware software from its on-premises environment. Growing in the cloud and enhancing its search capabilities with Azure, the firm has introduced several Azure AI services features to its solution, including text translation and entity linking in Azure AI Language and an Azure SQL Server operational data mart. “Our knowledge graph is critical to understand the context and relationship of our data, which is why we use Microsoft Graph as the pathway to data and intelligence in Microsoft 365,” says Nicholls.

Across every use case, the firm can easily make each of its Azure services available to its development team without contacting Microsoft. It moves straight into its product and service innovation and development phase without getting bogged down in manual infrastructure management and monitoring.

Gaining knowledge capabilities and generating time savings

Nicholls points to a sheer “lack of disadvantages” as one of the biggest benefits of using Azure AI resources. He also notes that the primary value comes from having solved a years-long intellectual property knowledge management challenge with absolute productivity gains. “Using our Azure AI–based solution helps consultants cut client meeting preparation time from days to just a few hours, and they curate content for presentations in half the amount of time it took before, allowing us to spend more time solving client problems and less creating documents,” says Nicholls. Adds Ignacio Garcia Alves, Global Chief Executive Officer at Arthur D. Little, “Our cutting-edge use of Azure AI isn’t just innovative, but groundbreaking. It represents the immense effort and expertise of our teams, unlocking our collective intelligence to tackle our clients’ most complex challenges.”

Arthur D. Little is now on its third version of the solution, seamlessly orchestrating between the GPT-4 large language model and all the firm’s content. It has experienced incredible adoption of the solution, which immediately helped employees boost their efficiency and productivity and maximize their insights and information. Using the generative AI capability of Azure OpenAI large language models, staff have moved beyond searching for information to interacting with data in real time, finding new insights and generating further intelligence. “Bringing our 137 years’ worth of knowledge into a high-impact technology capability seemed impossible before,” notes Nicholls. “But layering multiple Azure AI elements and putting everything into one accessible solution has helped us understand and unlock the value of our intellectual capital across our various landscapes.”

The firm is rolling out the ability for teams to upload their own data into the solution to establish broader coverage of knowledge capabilities. This will help consultants better serve clients while expanding the use of semantic search and knowledge graphs for the best possible contextual search experience. “The change in mindset that we’ve made through this new relationship with Microsoft is influenced by the growth in capabilities of Azure and Microsoft’s development of new AI services and capabilities on an almost weekly basis,” says Nicholls. “We’re now trying to make use of as much of that as possible and extend our product life cycle.”

Arthur D. Little is also at an advanced stage and replicating its solution for clients, especially those invested in research and development and intellectual property. “We’ve treated ourselves as our first and best customer, and we now have tangible evidence that the combination of Azure AI capabilities with our own data science expertise, especially on the use of knowledge graphs, can produce real benefits for our clients”, says Dr. Michael Eiden, Partner and Global Head of AI at Arthur D. Little. “We see significant potential to scale out while continuing to comply with regulatory and contractual privacy and confidentiality requirements.”

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