<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nTheir solution? \u201cYoda,\u201d an AI-driven career coach, set to democratize career coaching by making it accessible to everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Career coaching is often out of reach for most employees due to its high cost. Human coaches require an extensive understanding of their client or mentee\u2019s background, interests, values, and career aspirations, which often requires a significant amount of time and effort. Yoda, uses generative AI to understand an individual’s background, skills, interests, and goals, providing personalized recommendations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The AI-driven career coach, Yoda, was designed to understand the nuances of multiple industries, a task that would be challenging for a human. It also scales across all employees within an organization, making it a cost-effective solution for HR teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yoda uses Microsoft Teams app and integrates with Career Compass, which pulls in data from various internal and external sources to create a comprehensive profile for each user. They used GPT 3.5 turbo to generate and parse the chats, analyze jobs, and profile information to provide users with customized recommendations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It solves two specific use cases: 1) personalized career pathing and scanning the entire organization for new opportunities, and 2) suggestions of internal networking contacts and potential mentors. Yoda considers the user’s profile, transition data, and job positions to suggest potential roles that the user might excel in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Consider the user persona, Jeanne, a systems engineer looking to transition into software engineering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The chatbot integrates with learning systems and internal job boards, providing users with a variety of resources to aid their career progression. In addition, it suggests connections within the organization that users can reach out to for insights and advice.<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nAI drafts introductory messages for users to send to potential connections. This feature helps users break the ice and initiate conversations, which can often be a daunting task.<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nThe team didn\u2019t stop at providing recommendations. Yoda continuously scans the organization for new opportunities that match the user’s career goals. When a suitable opportunity arises, the chatbot sends a personalized message to the user, summarizing the position and explaining why it might be a good fit.<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nA user can save their career choice through the chat using natural language, integrating actions in addition to pure content generation and suggestion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The SeekOut Team 1 believes Yoda offers a unique solution for hyper-personalized career coaching and scalability. Their presentation included the potential for this tool to provide high-level insights to HR and organizational leaders, such as common career progressions, desired skills, and developmental needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They plan to further integrate the Career Compass app within teams, gamify skills development, and add Yoda to the manager’s experience to support managers in helping employees grow and develop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
SeekOutTeam 2<\/h3>\n\n\n\n SeekOut Team 2 showcased a game-changing solution to enable talent leaders to answer critical questions like, “What skills does my organization have and how can I effectively find people with those skills and organize them better?” The team introduced a dynamic skills platform that leverages Microsoft 365 and OpenAI to provide insights into the skillsets of employees, offering a new level of understanding for talent leaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Understanding Employee Skills<\/h4>\n\n\n\n Team 2\u2019s solution focused on helping organizations understand the talent they have and how to grow it. They developed a skills intelligence platform that ingests data from various sources, including resumes, GitHub, and other professional documents.<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nThe platform uses this data to build relationships between skills and how they relate to the larger organizational picture. It also provides evidence of how different employees have demonstrated their skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The dynamic skills platform seeks to understand what the employee has done and what kind of skills they have demonstrated in their productivity tools and resumes. The platform is designed to adapt to real-time context when someone is using it, allowing for more specific queries. For example, instead of asking which people have machine learning as a skill, a talent leader can ask, “How is machine learning used by data scientists at my company?”<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nThe platform’s integration with Microsoft 365 using Microsoft Graph API adds more depth to the skills platform. It takes documents from Microsoft 365, feeds them into Azure OpenAI to generate information on the skills, and then adds this to the skills database. This information is then accessible through the Skills Explorer application.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The team demonstrated how a hiring manager at Company X could use the platform to understand the skills of a program manager. The platform breaks down the skills profile for the role, showing functional, technical, and leadership skills. The manager can then delve deeper into each skill, seeing evidence from resumes, job postings, and Microsoft 365 files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The platform also provides a way for the manager to see how specific skills, like project management, are used by program managers at Company X. The manager can see documents linked to the skill and the details of these documents. This information can help the manager understand what skills they need for a new role or craft a job description for an open position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Privacy and Next Steps<\/h4>\n\n\n\n The SeekOut team took privacy into account, ensuring all data ingestion runs in the customer’s environment. There is a layer of data separation to protect user data, and customer data never comes to the SeekOut team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tech stack<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nThe team utilized the gpt-3.5-turbo model with Microsoft Graph API, Azure OpenAI, and Azure SQL for their dynamic skills platform. The architecture of their solution comprised several key building blocks. These included the Graph API to download team content from Microsoft 365, an offline OpenAI data pipeline to determine the skills demonstrated by the authors of the One Drive documents, and a SQL database backend to store the relationship between skills and employees.<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nThe team’s solution involved pulling data from Google Drive and embedding it into Azure’s Cognitive Search. This allowed them to process the data and make it searchable for the engineering team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The team showcased their solution by asking it questions about specific incidents or issues. The system identified relevant documents and provided hyperlinks to the original runbooks or incident reports and any technical documentation about the tools they are using.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The team’s project was a fascinating demonstration of how AI and cloud technologies can be leveraged to streamline internal processes and improve efficiency. They used GPT 3.5 Turbo, available through Azure OpenAI Service. The architecture was based on a standard RAG pattern implemented using Azure Cognitive Search for the Vector Database.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The solution involved several components, such as Google Drive integration for document ingestion, LlamaIndex for document processing and orchestration, Azure Cognitive Search for storing embedded chunks, and Streamlit for a simple chat interface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite some challenges, they demonstrated how startups can leverage these to enhance their internal processes. The team’s commitment to improving their system, such as their plans to address the issue with acronyms and codes in semantic search and to gather user feedback, underscores the continuous evolution and potential of AI solutions in the business world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the winner was….<\/h2>\n\n\n\n Highspot Team 2! Highspot Team 2\u2019s solution not only aligned with the hackathon’s goals but also demonstrated a practical and impactful approach. As a result, the work of their greater team was included in Satya Nadella\u2019s keynote presentation at Microsoft Ignite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To our winners, you’ve rocked this with your incredible skills and innovation. And to all our participants, your energy and creativity truly lit up this event.<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nEvery one of you is a star in our tech galaxy. Keep shining and see you at the next hackathon!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Microsoft Private Capital and Global Independent Software Vendor Teams, in collaboration with Madrona Ventures, recently organized a GenAI hackathon for portfolio companies, hosted at the Redmond campus. 33 participants from Amperity, Clari, Highspot, and SeekOut, formed seven teams, to explore generative AI solutions. Prior to the Hackathon, participants crafted distinctive problem statements and strategized with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":1646,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ms_queue_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,72],"tags":[48,14,405],"coauthors":[675,676,677,678],"class_list":["post-1592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events","category-fundraising","tag-ai","tag-hackathon","tag-madrona"],"yoast_head":"\n
Charting AI Frontiers: Microsoft + Madrona Ventures GenAI Hackathon - Microsoft for Startups Blog<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n