Money Buzz! Europa

Tag: ibm

  • Bulgarian software company Ablera and IBM co-created ”Beth” Virtual Assistant

    Bulgarian software company Ablera and IBM co-created ”Beth” Virtual Assistant

    IBM announced that Ablera, a Bulgarian company specialized in developing AI/ML powered digital services for businesses, chose IBM Garage to co-create ”Beth”, an intelligent multilingual and multichannel virtual assistant for insurers, powered by IBM Watson on IBM Cloud.

    A Minimum viable product (MVP) of a virtual assistant has been developed in two weeks.

    Further built on this base, Ablera’s Intelligent Virtual Assistant Beth supports insurance companies’ interactions with their customers, agents and employees and assists them in processing quickly and easily general and specific tasks such as quotations, the first notices of loss (FNOL), automatic claim processing in real time 24/7/365, emulating human communication with the end user.

    Beth will walk customers through the insurance process to complete their requests and tasks within minutes, eliminating points of friction in the customer experience.

    The customers can instantly chat with Beth in their native languages and obtain support via different channels (messaging platforms, web, apps) from any device.

    Beth is trained to understand various kinds of questions asked in different ways, to recognize intentions and to provide personalized and customized answers and advices, extracting the necessary information from various sources with which it is integrated (insurer’s core system, financial system, Customer Relationship Management, etc.).

    Beth is trained and can be already used for all personal non-life insurance business lines (Motor, Home, Travel) while Health and Commercial insurance is in Ablera’s roadmap for the next year.

  • IBM to cut around 10,000 jobs in Europe

    IBM to cut around 10,000 jobs in Europe

    IBM plans to cut 10,000 jobs in Europe in a bid to cut costs to its IT services division before putting it up for sale, sources close to the company told Bloomberg.

    Large-scale restructuring will cover about 20% of IBM’s workforce in Europe.

    The most impacted would be subsidiaries in the UK and Germany, but restructuring is also being considered in Poland, Slovakia, Italy and Belgium.

    The hardest hit will be IBM ‘s IT services division, which handles day – to – day operations such as managing customer data centers and traditional IT support for equipment installation, operation and repair.

  • Romania: Technology companies quadrupled their businesses and teams

    Romania: Technology companies quadrupled their businesses and teams

    The top 50 largest technology companies in Romania, which realise software and digital solutions for group companies or for third parties, have increased in the last ten years by approximately four times the turnover and local teams, reaching a cumulative turnover of 3 billion euros and over 50,000 employees in 2019, according to a Cushman & Wakefield Echinox analysis.

    Most of these companies, such as Amazon, IBM, HP, Microsoft or Oracle, are also in the top of the largest technology companies globally, which reconfirms Romania’s position in the top of the most dynamic IT hubs in the world.

    With 5.5% contribution to Romania’s GDP overall formation in 2019, the technology sector has become an important pillar of the national economy, but also of the real estate market, given that companies in this industry have been the most active office occupier in the last decade, both in Bucharest and in other university centers in Romania, such as Cluj, Timişoara or Iaşi, generating, on average, about 40% of demand.

    The latest data of the National Institute of Statistics indicated in 2018 a number of 140,000 employees in the IT industry in Romania, most of them working in Bucharest (46%), Cluj (12%), Timişoara (9% ) and Iaşi (6%).

    In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, in which the digitization processes have been accelerated both among companies and public administrations, Romania is in a position to become an important provider of technological solutions that will contribute to the information systems efficiency.

    The average net salaries of Romanian employees working in the data technology sector were about 7.800 lei (1.600 EUR) in May 2020, being the highest in the Romanian economy, but among the lowest in the IT industry worldwide, the local market remaining extremely competitive in terms of wage costs.

    The stock of modern offices in Bucharest and regional cities (Cluj-Napoca, Timişoara, Iaşi and Braşov) amounts to approximately 4 million square meters, housing about 350,000 employees in various fields, such as IT, telecom, financial services (banks – insurance), professional services (lawyers – consultants), media, etc.