Cooperativa Integrada taps Oracle Digital Assistant to enhance its Iris chatbot

With more than 12,000 members and 2,000 employees, Integrada Cooperativa Agroindustrial is a farming cooperative in Brazil, producing soybeans, corn, wheat, coffee, oranges, and other crops that are sold in more than 250 municipalities across the states of Paraná and São Paulo. The organization also has industrial units that manufacture corn derivatives, feed for various animals and pet food, as well as essential oils and orange juice concentrate.

One of the key tools for the cooperative is the Integrada app, which allows its members to check on open orders, production deliveries, income statements, contracts, billing, and other important information in real time. The organization also developed a virtual assistant named Iris that could interact with members and respond to queries. Until last year, Iris was available only on WhatsApp and had a service module similar to an Interactive Voice Response system, but with limited functionality. Integrada wanted to expand the capabilities of its virtual assistant, making it available on more channels and offering new features powered by AI.

Integrada selected Oracle Digital Assistant to enhance the digital experience for its members and customers, allowing for more complex requests and conversational experiences through natural language processing and AI. Oracle Digital Assistant could also provide the cooperative with the omnichannel capabilities it needed to extend the use of Iris beyond WhatsApp, making it available on Integrada’s application, websites, and customer portals.

Moreover, Oracle Digital Assistant provides various analytical insights into user interactions, bringing valuable insights to the cooperative. Through supervised machine learning, AI can be trained to offer more effective responses to users with each use, increasing the likelihood of problem resolution and addressing queries directly in the virtual assistant. The platform also supports integration with generative AI and large language model APIs, which can generate responses from a large volume of data.

With the use of Oracle Digital Assistant, Iris recorded a significant increase in engagement. Currently, the virtual assistant records an average of 800 conversations per month, an increase of approximately 8X. In recent months, this number has increased to 1,000 monthly conversations, because Iris is present on more Integrada channels.

Oracle Digital Assistant also helps monitor the effectiveness of Iris's conversation flows, with the average number of completed conversations exceeding 94%. This quality index was achieved by the methodology created by Integrada and its implementation partner, MPL Corporate Software.

Oracle Digital Assistant also gave Integrada a better understanding of the user journey. The cooperative could see which channels were being used the most, topics most sought after by members, and whether the queries were answered. This visibility helped the company plan for future implementations in both the app and the virtual assistant.

Integrada also uses OCI Vision, an AI service built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for performing deep-learning–based image analysis. With it, the user can take and send a photo of a pet to the virtual assistant, which uses image recognition to recommend the most suitable food for the animal. The company also tapped Oracle Cloud Functions, which, through Python programming, generate a geolocation feature that tells customers which Integrada distributor is closest for product purchase. In addition, using the Oracle APEX platform, Integrada developed an Iris administration portal to help different business areas customize Iris’s settings.

Through a partnership with agriculture technology company Embrapa, Integrada trained Iris to answer hundreds of questions about soy based on a book on the topic. If the subject related to soy is not found, Iris integrates with Maritaca, a generative AI-powered chatbot that runs on OCI, allowing the virtual assistant to answer any questions about the legume.

With the improvements brought by Oracle Digital Assistant, customer evaluations of the app climbed to 4.4 on a scale of 1 to 5.

The implementation of Oracle Digital Assistant was carried out by MPL Corporate Software. The project lasted about 45 days and occurred within the stipulated time frame.