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IBM
The Situation
IBM's healthcare contact centre operation managed thousands of daily patient interactions spanning appointment scheduling, urgent medical coordination, and healthcare programme navigation. IBM set a clear strategic target: Watson AI should handle 90% or more of interactions without human intervention. NiCE CXone was the CCaaS environment. At the time of engagement, NiCE had no native AI capabilities.
Thus, every component of the integration would need to be built from scratch. IBM's healthcare interactions involved protected patient health information requiring HIPAA compliance. Internal data showed that 60% of patients would abandon a call if they perceived a system transfer, so the AI-to-agent handoff had to be completely invisible.
What We Did
One Primero built a custom AI orchestration layer inside NiCE that did not exist in the platform. Watson processed chat, SMS, and voice interactions. The team manually coded approximately 80% of the AI training pipeline, iterating Watson's responses across thousands of interactions to reach the 90% deflection target.
End-to-end encryption for protected health information was implemented via custom TLS SIP trunk configuration and secured REST API communication. The AI-to-agent handoff produced no audible transition. The solution deployed progressively: chat and SMS first, then voice.
What Followed
Watson handled more than 90% of interactions without human intervention. During COVID peak, the system scaled to handle 125,000+ voice calls per hour across vaccination scheduling and testing coordination across multiple US states. IBM estimated they would have needed to double their workforce without this solution.
The patterns established here — custom AI orchestration, clean handoff, HIPAA-compliant engineering — became the foundation for every subsequent AI–CCaaS integration One Primero has delivered.
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