Case Study: Australian Red Cross tackles language barriers with generative AI

The Australian Red Cross is bringing in generative AI to help tackle language barriers as it moves through its major transformation plus plans to create a marketplace of tech volunteers.

Brett Wilson, CIO at the Australian Red Cross told Digital Nation crossing language barriers plays an important role at the volunteer-based organisation. 

“It's only early days. We've been looking at Microsoft Copilot. We help a lot of vulnerable people whose English is not necessarily their first language and they might come to Australia and they come to our website and try to figure out how we can help them.

“With Copilot, we've tested this and we've been able to interrogate our websites and ask a question in, say for example, Spanish. 

“Then it will respond with the results from our website in Spanish. What we're hoping now is the next phase of that which is to prove that we could then translate documents automatically on the fly using Copilot.”

Wilson said this would be a “great step ahead” plus potentially “enable a lot of the other national societies across the globe to use that functionality as well”. 

He added the “cool” thing about the Copilot is that it “takes the nuances of the language that is coming in and it translates it back with the nuances as well, not just a word-for-word response.”

Bringing in people to volunteer tech skills and create a marketplace is another area of focus for the organisation, Wilson said. 

“We have about 20,000 volunteers and any given time. There's sort of 8 to 10, 000 are activated and so they might provide services in retail or they might go out to an emergency or disaster.

“What we're looking at is how do we create a marketplace of tech volunteers who are interested in volunteering their time, but potentially not going and working in a store, but they might be great at data or they might be good at integration. 

“So, how do we bring them together to get them involved in providing services back to us to create impact,” Wilson said. 

It also means the brand could utilise ideas in the marketplace as a “sort of a sandpit and come up with great ideas that we may not have been able to before because we may not have had access to some great talent within certain specialised areas.”

Transformational shifts 

Wilson explained before its latest work, the Australian Red Cross kicked off a massive digital undertaking.

“We had an aging tech stack and what that meant for us was we would then not be efficient, we couldn't rely on data, no single source of truth, but also we had tech spread across the organisation.”

While it was before the work it was difficult to “get economies of scale”, having a unified platform has eased pressure on team members.

“The key thing it's enabled us now that we haven't been able to do before is rely on single sources of truth for data, 

“We've been able to bring staff, volunteers and members into one system and we've never had that before. 

“It's surfaced several opportunities around compliance now we can see across the organisation for compliance, and it's also meaning that we can now have a single entry point within to Red Cross around recruitment.

Wilson added on top of its transformational work, the organisation is also looking to bring in a support bot. 

“We've got a couple of initiatives happening around where we're looking at a support bot from a company called Moveworks.

"Support bots generally just answer questions and they're fairly rudimentary, whereas the Moveworks support bot potentially actually do things. 

“If you ask it to say, ‘I'd like you to add me to this distribution list’, it will then go and determine whether it needs approval for that distribution list or it can just add you.”

The aim is to free up service desk time and potentially close around 30 percent of calls received by the community services charity. 

“It goes back to that thing around trying to improve the user experience, but also the more efficient we become, the easier it can be to try and make sure we're out in the community trying to create impact as well.”

Wilson said the team is also “looking at other areas with one of our other partners, which is Boomi.” 

The Australian Red Cross has early access to Boomi AI and will hopefully ease the need for technical integration specialists and improved distribution of organisational resources.  

Wilson added the organisation also now has “a great ecosystem and a foundation from Microsoft within CRM.” 

“We've started using Copilot to determine whether we can segment specific marketing groups out to produce a marketing list, or could we use Copilot to help us create presentations on certain subjects, drawing on access to documents and things that we have across our Microsoft ecosystem as well.” 

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