NewsRecall: Aurecon’s GenAI tool that’s like talking to a company expert

Aurecon’s Managing Principal, Digital, Dave Mackenzie said that as the data and information provided by Aurecon Recall was company-specific, it was quite different to general generative AI models and made chatting with the intelligent assistant like talking to an Aurecon expert.

“The problems our clients are facing now, be it energy transition, climate risk or transitioning to a circular economy are so complex and interconnected it is reasonable to ask the question ‘can humans solve these problems on their own?’ If the answer is no, we need smarter tools, like Aurecon Recall, to augment our ability to solve these challenges,” Mackenzie said.

In addition to information retrieval, Aurecon Recall is also a sense maker, connecting disparate pieces of data across multiple dimensions and identifying what connections exist between different datasets, both the obvious and the obscure. This enables Aurecon to better solve complex problems – this really is the AI solution's superpower.

Aurecon Recall is one of a suite of generative AI tools that will help accelerate the digital transformation of Aurecon’s clients and the company itself. It is how Aurecon is taking generative AI to its clients through its services.

“The big win for Aurecon’s teams, and what I am really excited about is that Aurecon Recall assists our people to do more for clients than what they can currently do,” Mackenzie said.

Aurecon Recall is embedded with over 600,000 pages of content from its knowledge hubs. This content, built up over many years, uses Aurecon’s deep technical domain expertise in the infrastructure, energy, resources, and water sectors to ensure the tool is industry specific. It is this knowledge that powers the Aurecon Recall database.

Aurecon’s Advanced Design Lead Theodoros Galanos said that Aurecon Recall showed how we could extract more value from the knowledge embedded in organisations.

“It’s an intuitive, efficient and intelligent interface that enables knowledge retrieval and re-deployment when and where it’s needed,” he said.

Aurecon encourages users to interrogate, verify and challenge the data sources and to use the inbuilt edit function to improve future answers. Users have the responsibility to interpret the outputs and attribute meaning to them. “Given our engineers place high importance on ensuring their advice and answers are as accurate as can be, they do not require much encouragement,” Mackenzie said.

When it comes to privacy – all Aurecon Recall data and information is contained within the company’s secure network and remains onshore in Australia. Endpoint encryption ensures data remains safe from unauthorised access when it is stored and transmitted to another endpoint.

Aurecon’s approach to digital transformation is to focus on integrating digital products into services while commercialising digital skills. The company’s recent win in the AFR Digital Transformation Leaders list was, in part, based on embedding award-winning digital products into its ways of working.

Mackenzie said that the next step was the generation and processing of other data types beyond text and then on to adding further AI digital tools to the Aurecon Recall platform that focus on solving specific domain and or business challenges.

“For Aurecon, it’s not about the technology – the technology follows the problem, so this is about finding the right client problems where we can apply Recall and Generative AI,” he said.