Working together, EPAM and Altera built RAG-based code assistant agents, each covering a specific codebase, to streamline software development. This allows team members to speed up their work with legacy codebases and retrieve answers much faster than they could by navigating those codebases manually.

Thanks to this solution, Altera software developers can now reverse engineer the often-opaque systems in which they were working to create a better understanding — and documentation — of these systems, paving a path for future modernization. Developers report up to an 80% reduction in documentation time and an overall 40% increase in productivity. The time it takes to onboard new developers has been reduced by 60%.

ROI: $1.1M - $2M over 5 years; $2.2M - $4M extrapolated across Altera

To help Altera's legal, compliance and vendor management teams quickly sort through the company’s myriad contracts, EPAM created a virtual paralegal to streamline contract evaluation by automating responses to common legal questions.

As most of the documents that Altera employees work with are stored as scanned pictures, our developers built an automatic optical character recognition (OCR) layer to convert those images to text before beginning dialogue with an LLM.

The result was a digital assistant that has reduced contract review time by 40%. Leveraging multiple LLMs, the agent reveals important contract clauses that could have otherwise gone undetected via manual review processes. With the addition of this solution, the business can prevent substantial financial losses.

In addition, faster contract processing directly enables faster vendor onboarding and more competitive bids.

ROI: $0.6M - $1.3M over 5 years; $1.2M - $2.6M extrapolated across Altera

DIAL doesn’t just help build agents. It empowers Altera to build new products for its customers. Note+ is the first instance of just that. 

DIAL is integrated into Note+, a groundbreaking platform that uses advanced AI and ambient listening to create structured clinical documentation.

Part of Altera’s EHR/EMR product line, Note+ records a conversation, with appropriate permissions, between a provider and patient. Then via DIAL as the gateway, that conversation is anonymously sent to the appropriate LLMs to create a summary and to recommend next steps to the provider. This important innovation in healthcare stands to directly improve patient outcomes by providing tangible, real-world support to providers.

EPAM’s goal with the implementation of DIAL for our clients is to enable them to use the platform independently to create their own agents and products. We provide the necessary training and upskilling, so that developers can use DIAL to realize their own innovations. Already, Altera developers have created several agents, the most successful of which so far has been the Knowledgebase agent. 

After decades of operation and multiple mergers and acquisitions, Altera’s knowledge base was fragmented and made up of both written documents and audio and video recordings. 

Knowledgebase is an agentic assistant based on AI DIAL that can use RAG to answer complex questions based on multiple pipelines of information. It dramatically simplifies access to the company’s internal technical knowledge.

EPAM developed a repeatable framework to measure and, ultimately, maximize value for any GenAI initiative at Altera. Our measurement approach includes a baseline assessment, robust cost model, financial benefit model and strategic benefits forecasting. This framework has already been key to decision-making.

To maximize value, we recommend matching high-impact pain points to use cases, leveraging DIAL with an iterative approach to design and development and focusing on quantifiable benefits tied to key business outcomes.

Importantly, the establishment of a dedicated executive role at Altera to spearhead GenAI transformation ensured successful organizational collaboration and commitment.