Gartner has recognized Tonkean in two separate 2024 Hype Cycle reports:
In the reports, Tonkean was featured in three categories: Legal Department Intake and Triage, Legal Chatbots, and Procurement Intake Management. There’s much that’s exciting about each category, starting with Intake and Triage, whose potential benefit to enterprise internal service teams Gartner rates as “transformational.” And mainstream adoption of AI-powered intake and triage software is on the rise, according to Gartner’s 2024 “hype cycle matrix.” (See below.)
In other words, innovative organizations that embrace this transformational technology now—and who seek out technology partners that’re leading the charge to define the category, like Tonkean—are getting in at the right time. Why is this? What makes intake and triage so important to internal service teams? Let’s break it down.
According to Gartner, whether it’s to increase efficiency, adequately enable employees, or create regular and scalable business value, internal service teams must have a well-defined and intelligent means of facilitating intake and triage—or, of receiving, assigning, executing, measuring, and managing work.
The problem is that many internal departments don’t. In many enterprise organizations, intake and triage is unwieldy. To facilitate it, internal teams have to conduct lots of manual work, and rubber-band together processes across many different systems and tools.
The experience for stakeholders, in turn—either when it comes to submitting requests or collaborating across departments to approve requests downstream—is onerous and complex, requiring, among other things, employees to log in to monolith systems they don’t know how to use.
There has been innovation among vendors designed to address this issue—hence the rise in recent years of process orchestration technology—but most have fallen short of their intended goals. The lion’s share of intake management and process orchestration tools, for example, provide either simple forms or chatbots.
The chatbots don’t give internal teams what they need; most merely help users navigate siloed UIs. This is helpful, of course, but it doesn’t solve the underlying issue.
Most intake forms, meanwhile, are designed to be comprehensive lists, meaning, they encourage you to load them up with all the questions you ever could need to complete the request. If you’re an end-user, what do you do when you’re filling out such an intake form and you don’t know the answer to one of the items requested? You either manually reach out to procurement, do some annoying homework yourself, or, more likely, drop off and opt out of following the process altogether. Or worst of all, you enter incorrect information to simply get the request finished and sent off, causing confusion and delays downstream.
This is why—in legal, for example—process adoption remains so low; at least 67% of employees routinely skip legal processes. Process experiences are not yet simple or personalizable enough. Though the same is true of procurement, HR, and IT.
However, low process adoption is not the only negative impact. Procurement processes, for example, are siloed and run too slowly. They also involve procurement teams far too late in intake processes to add real, unique value, which limits their potential effectiveness both as practitioners and as business partners. Without a proper venue for real-time collaboration, the quality of work suffers.
Both legal and procurement can solve these problems with smart, flexible, holistically integrated intake and triage tools. The best of these tools—the ones that are defining what’s possible in this category and that are proving its transformational benefits—are orchestration and management solutions.
Take Tonkean, for example, an orchestration platform designed to help transform internal teams from transactional siloes into strategic nexuses.
The Copilot ties together all the most innovative elements of the emerging science of AI-powered intake management and orchestration. It consists of an AI Front Door, the AI Concierge, AI-enhanced forms, in-line AI Q&A, human-in-the-loop collaboration, and orchestration through end-to-end integration.
Gartner predicts that by developing a more effective intake and triage system, internal service teams can reduce cycle times, better manage work, create more business value, and increase productivity.
We’d argue that, with an intake and triage system powered by AI intake orchestration, all that's just the beginning.
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