Leading the Way Towards an Autonomous Organization

The Challenge

Lemonade, a US-based tech company with almost $500M in funding, is revolutionizing the insurance market. With a mission to disrupt the insurance market and let humans focus on innovation, Lemonade uses an AI-powered assistant to digitize the insurance-buying experience for renters and homeowners. But behind the scenes, Lemonade mobilizes multiple AI assistants—not just for customer-facing functions, but across the whole organization.

Lemonade had a question: How to scale the business without simply hiring more people, and how to automate routine, organizational work. Like all companies with an engineering workflow, many tasks are repetitive. Documenting internal processes and measuring and controlling workflows are critical; but at times, these tasks feel tedious and slow down the process of delivering work to production.

Lemonade needed a conversational AI framework that provides the freedom to fully customize and integrates with existing workflows and tools—while still maintaining full control over their sensitive company data.

The Solution

Lemonade chose Rasa to create a powerful AI assistant that would drive its engineering team and automate other internal tasks. The team created Cooper, an “internal automation brain,” that handles and delivers tasks to production.

Cooper interfaces with the Lemonade team via Slack, its internal communication system. The assistant assigns tasks, prepares testing environments, runs automated tests, and even deploys updates. It also handles tasks such as sprint planning, sending company logos and colors, and more.

The Results

Cooper’s smarts have saved tremendous amounts of time, money, and headcount for Lemonade. Ultimately, this has led to faster development, smoother deployments, and more efficient processes—factors that have helped Lemonade insure around half a million homes as of April, 2019.

It’s also been part of delivering on the company’s mission to become an autonomous organization, a future where AI assistants will manage tasks more efficiently than humans.

We built Cooper using Rasa, which was the only solution and fit for us at Lemonade. Using Rasa’s machine learning framework, we’re able to hire smart humans who create real impact while automating everything else.

Nathanial Kohn, Data Science Lead at Lemonade