3rd place in the Business Plan category

Fokusnuss
Constantin Jukowski, Karl-Heinrich Oks, Claas Bertels

When an individual IT problem occurs in a company, the employee usually reports it to the IT support team. Often, however, several dialogue loops are necessary in order to obtain the information relevant to solving the problem. To support IT staff in larger organisations in solving IT support problems, Constantin Jukowski, Karl-Heinrich Oks and Claas Bertels have opted for the use of augmented intelligence. Focus Nut is a software product that combines two AI methods to provide augmented intelligence functions: In Natural Language Processing, an algorithm processes and recognises terms that play a role in the company or problem context. In addition, an expert system in the sense of a formal knowledge database allows hypotheses for problem solving to be created and tested. In this way, the reported problem descriptions are linguistically analysed and related to learned information on possible problem causes, relevant systems and corrective measures. In this way, the machine knowledge is expanded with each reported IT problem case and the solution of future cases is made more efficient.

Fokusnuss (“Focus nut”) is a catchy name that also describes the core idea of the product: stay focussed. Knowledge workers should be able to concentrate on one thing and be supported as best as possible by AI technology when trying to crack the “problem nut”. This is also the underlying idea of AI: the technology is intended to provide support, not full automation. For the Fokusnuss team, putting a research project into practise is an exciting process. “I fine-tuned the technology in my doctoral thesis. Now we are close to putting a product on the market that can solve real customer problems – which is great” says Constantin Jukowski, describing his underlying motivation. Carl-Heinrich Oks and Claas Bertels, who have been working as consultants in the IT sector for years, have another point of view. As consultants, they make recommendations but have little influence on product development. “In a small team you are able to work in a totally different way” says Oks. “You can unleash a whole new dimension of creativity and move towards implementation much faster.” All three are of the same opinion: “As a team, we work very well. If the pilot project shows the customer that the idea really delivers, then we are able to take the next steps with confidence.”