Inside the AI copilot revolution that saved Essent €1.8M with Kellin Sjoerds and Ricky Rekkers

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Kane Simms

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About this episode

Discover how Essent built an award-winning AI copilot that cut call times, empowered agents, and saved €1.8M – all through innovative design, safe deployment, and real-world innovation.

Presented by NLX

Build and deploy sophisticated chat, voice, and multimodal applications for any purpose with NLX. NLX works seamlessly with any LLM and existing tech stack, freeing you to create, not configure. Trusted by individual builders and leading teams at Comcast, Saks Fifth Avenue, Toyota, and United Airlines, NLX helps you turn AI concepts into working conversational experiences.

In this episode, we chat with Kellin Sjoerds and Ricky Wekker, Conversational AI Engineers at Essent – the Netherlands’ largest utility provider and part of the E.ON Group to uncover the story behind their groundbreaking agent assist tool, Bolt.

Bolt is an AI-powered agent copilot that has transformed Essent’s call centre operations, shaving an average of 60 seconds off every call and delivering over €1.8 million in savings, not through layoffs, but by reducing dependence on BPOs.

We unpack the full journey behind Essent’s AI copilot, Bolt, starting with a simple observation during a team shadowing session that sparked its creation. What began as a hackathon MVP quickly turned heads, prompting leadership to ask, “How fast can we launch this?”

From there, we uncover how the team tackled complex challenges like cleaning and restructuring their knowledge base, implementing a smart chunking system, and fine-tuning prompts to ensure accurate, reliable outputs. And through a carefully staged rollout, they struck the right balance between innovation and safety, navigating compliance hurdles while delivering impressive business value.

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Kane Simms

A strategic AI advisor who, for the past decade, has helped business leaders and product owners transform customer experience using conversational and generative AI.

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