2022-04-29 - ACCES Virtual Employment and Resource Assistant (VERA) Support

Project Overview
ACCES has a virtual attendant on its website that uses IBM Watson Assistant and IBM Watson Discovery technology to increase access to information and ACCES’ programs. VERA (Virtual Employment and Resource Assistant) is a valuable doorway to our services, is available 24/7, reduces staff time spent on responding to routine inquiries, and allows users to self-register for events and log their interest in our programs for jobseekers or services for employers. We also deployed a smaller instance of VERA on our Facebook Messenger app to respond to the typical inquiries we receive through that channel. We are planning a series of enhancements to VERA made possible through a government-funded grant and we are considering other use cases for this technology.

Scope of Work
• Provide technical support and guidance to ensure that all resources and service environments in the IBM Cloud are working properly (including development and production versions of Watson Assistant, instances of Watson Assistant [web and Facebook Messenger], Watson Discovery, etc.).
4 RFP# 2022-04-29
• Support ACCES to maintain a subscription with IBM for these products.
• Ensure that all existing daily and monthly scripts have run correctly and if a script has not run, make prompt corrections in order to avoid data loss.
• Coordinate weekly meetings (30 minutes) with the ACCES team to discuss progress and seek clarity on items.
• Maintain a shared job board with ACCES so that there is clear visibility on all upcoming, current and completed items.
• Provide guidance and share expert advice to ACCES on issues related to the IBM Cloud environment and any global changes that will or could impact our products.