• Enables rapid deployment of an enterprise chat assistant with Google Workspace and Google Cloud

• Responds in under one second to over 95% of all inquiries

• Accelerates Red Hatters easy access to critical information—saving time, reducing costs, and improving productivity

When Jeffrey Daube joined Red Hat in 2015, the company was already using Gmail and Google Calendar. His role, as principal business systems analyst in the IT productivity group, was to expand utilization beyond Google Workspace and build custom internal cloud solutions for Red Hatters using tools and services available in Google Cloud.

“Google Chat is the single, IT-supported, chat platform for all Red Hatters,” says Daube. “We use it quite heavily.” He was using Chat and experimenting with bots when he was pulled into a project with Red Hat’s EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) sales group.

The group had developed an ad hoc messaging app to help salespeople find the phone numbers of technical specialists who could answer urgent questions. “The app was not scalable,” says Daube. “Working collaboratively, we were able to quickly develop a Chatbot using Google Apps Script as a proof of concept for a more secure, scalable solution.”

The project had a simple goal: get the right information to the right people in as few steps as possible. It started with solving 90 of the top sales queries, which could be answered by materials accessed through a smartphone or other mobile device for real-time use. It also formed the genesis of Shadowbot.

According to Daube, “One of the most unique aspects of Shadowbot is the seamless interplay between Google Workspace and Google Cloud Platform.” Shadowbot is accessed through a modern message UI in Chat on Google Workspace. When a user enters a query, Google Chat API forwards it to the Red Hat build of Quarkus for serverless containers running on Cloud Run.

Quarkus on Cloud Run enables a response time of under one second for over 95% of all Shadowbot interactions. In addition, Cloud Run allows for rapid horizontal scaling from two containers, which are always live, to as many as nine during major Shadowbot announcements. This ensures optimum performance regardless of the interaction frequency.

Quarkus reaches out to Postgres, an open source database where Red Hat’s persona attributes are stored, via Google Cloud SQL. If needed, the message can be sent to the Google Translate API, which can translate over 100 languages in a few seconds. The message is then sent to Google Dialogflow, for natural language understanding of the intent and parameters of the user query. Once the intent of the query is determined, a reply is provided in the appropriate language.

If someone in sales asks, “What is ZVO?” Shadowbot will reply that “ZVO” stands for a zero-value opportunity and provide links to information and videos explaining the term in more detail. Similarly, someone could enter, “I feel lonely.” Daube says, “This may sound weird, but someone working remotely from home during a COVID office shutdown might feel lonely.” Shadowbot will use its semantic capabilities and reply with links to Red Hat’s well-being initiatives.

In addition to the question-answer workflow, details of every query and reply are logged into Google BigQuery. This is important because the information guides learning and curation.

“Connecting BigQuery to Google Sheets enabled us to quickly and easily build a dashboard where we can track the increasing usage of Shadowbot in real time,” says Aziz. It shows that daily interactions more than doubled between January and July of 2022. During this period, a total of 2,900 unique Red Hatters had over 33,000 interactions with Shadowbot. Initial inquiries indicate Shadowbot has decreased the time required for Red Hatters to find the right information by between 2 and 12 minutes per interaction.

Beyond the numbers, Aziz sees the enthusiasm of Red Hatters from different departments working together and building Shadowbot for the benefit of everyone. He is confident it will achieve its goals because, “It’s for Red Hatters by Red Hatters.”

His confidence is echoed by users who praise Shadowbot’s quick and easy usability, extensibility, and potential to significantly improve productivity. “I believe Shadowbot could be a game-changer,” states a senior director of global product marketing. “The ability to easily search and access customer-facing content, sales tools, and specific enablement anytime from anywhere... I would have killed for that when I was in the field.”