Product management for building the inaugural AI-powered chatbot for the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Veteran Experience Office.
Veteran Support Chatbot
Role
Product Manager
Year
2021
Goals
Speed
To reduce the hours of human support needed to serve veterans with only minimal to no impact to the excellent support VA provides to the U.S. veteran population.
Accuracy
A chatbot on VA's website would allow veterans to get their questions answered more quickly, be directed to necessary forms for submitting claims, and have the bot escalate their case to a human care agent when needed.
Integration
A critical piece of this effort was the chatbot’s seamless integration into existing VA veteran support infrastructure. Work included training VA human support agents on tool usage, its escalation criteria, and how to facilitate its adoption such that both human and AI chatbot support would coexist to improve veteran benefits.
My Takeaways
This was the first project I worked on that involved AI tech. Working iteratively with my cross-functional team, I learned how essential it was to combine automated and human-conducted QA testing in AI projects, over and over again. This is true in most projects but particularly with AI that is non-deterministic and models that generate capricious content.
Without the many cycles of both computer and human testing, the VA chatbot we built would not have been able to match the excellent VA support that veterans and their caregivers and family relied on. These repeated testing cycles also brought home the power of iterative/agile software development.