An Experienced Chatbot – The Case of Technical Knowledge at Electricity of France (EDF)

From a practical point of view, Knowledge Management is both a mix of well-established corporate procedures and an emerging field of academic research. The opposition might be strong between these different points of view. To go a step forward, we had a pragmatic approach, including theory and practice, engineers, and academics. We will see how an innovation can germinate, with a classical KM problem: experts are retiring soon, how could we “transfer” their experience? Therefore, we followed a Data Sliming methodology, combining Technical Expertise and Contextual Data. In this paper, we focus on an air conditioner: how and where to install it? The discussions in the team set up an innovation: a “conversationalist”, i.e., a chatbot whose dialog is that of an expert.