Cricket Australia (CA) is the national governing body for cricket in Australia, supporting a diverse workforce across elite and community cricket operations. HCLTech partnered with Cricket Australia to modernize finance operations through an AI-powered query automation solution, enabling employees to access financial information quickly and efficiently.

The Challenge

Cricket Australia faced challenges with:

• Limited visibility into invoice processing and supplier onboarding status.
• High dependency on finance teams for routine financial queries.
• Fragmented information spread across multiple enterprise systems.
• Manual query handling impacting productivity and user experience.

The Objective

Cricket Australia aimed to improve operational efficiency by providing employees with self-service access to financial information, reducing manual effort and enabling faster decision-making through AI-powered assistance.

The Solution

HCLTech designed and implemented a solution using Microsoft Copilot Studio, integrated with Dynamics 365 ERP, Finance Data Warehouse, SQL Server, SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.

Key capabilities included:

• Invoice Agent for invoice status tracking, reporting, forecasting and exception management.
• Finance Agent for P&L, budgeting, forecasting and financial analysis queries.
• Conversational access to enterprise financial data and knowledge repositories.
• Real-time responses delivered securely through Microsoft Teams.

The Impact

• 50–60% projected efficiency improvement in finance-related activities.
• Reduced workload on finance and operations teams through self-service automation.
• Faster access to financial insights and invoice information.
• Improved employee experience with instant access to policies, procedures and financial data.
• Established a scalable, secure AI foundation for future enterprise use cases.

Elders, one of Australia’s leading agribusiness organizations, embarked on a large-scale transformation journey by modernizing legacy systems to Microsoft Dynamics 365. To accelerate user adoption and provide continuous learning support, Elders partnered with HCLTech to develop an AI-powered Virtual Trainer that delivers personalized, real-time assistance to employees throughout their transformation journey.

The Challenge

As Elders transitioned to Dynamics 365, the organization faced several adoption and enablement challenges:

• Traditional training methods were static, time-intensive and lacked personalization.
• Employees had limited access to on-demand support for day-to-day process queries.
• User adoption and employee experience needed improvement to maximize transformation outcomes.

The Objective

Elders sought to create a scalable learning solution that would provide employees with real-time guidance, simplify access to process knowledge and accelerate adoption of new business applications and workflows.

The Solution

HCLTech designed and implemented an AI-powered Virtual Trainer (PoC) leveraging Microsoft Azure AI services and conversational technologies.

Key capabilities included:

• Real-time, personalized guidance for users navigating Dynamics 365 processes.
• Interactive training tutorials delivered through a conversational avatar experience.
• Instant responses to process and application-related queries.
• Context-aware support integrated with enterprise knowledge and business data.
• Secure architecture utilizing private endpoints and Responsible AI principles.

The Impact

• Accelerated Dynamics 365 user adoption across the organization.
• Enhanced employee experience and productivity through self-service support.
• Reduced reliance on traditional classroom and instructor-led training.
• Established a scalable and reusable AI-powered training framework for future transformation initiatives.

Coles Group is one of Australia’s leading retailers, operating a vast network of over 1,600 supermarket and liquor stores nationwide. Since its foundation in Collingwood, Victoria in 1914, Coles has grown to become the second-largest retailer in Australia after its principal rival, Woolworths, in terms of revenue.

The Challenge

At the heart of Coles’s operation is the Store Customer Platform team, a critical enabler of seamless in-store experiences for millions of Australians every week. This team plays a pivotal role in delivering innovative, customer-centric solutions that support store operations, enhance service delivery and drive engagement across Coles’ diverse retail footprint. The Store Customer Platform (SCP) team are responsible for Item ticketing across all Coles stores.

Coles operates with over 20,000 SKUs and 80 pricing formats, making manual price tag verification a major source of errors and inefficiencies. The key challenge was to address critical challenges such as frequent pricing errors, inconsistent customer experiences and the lack of a scalable system for digital signage. Manual processes were prone to human error and inefficiencies, making it difficult to maintain accuracy and agility in dynamic pricing environments.

The Solution

Leveraging HCLTech innovation fund with Coles, we worked with Microsoft and Coles to co-develop Project Alfred, an AI-powered solution that automates pricing- reducing errors, enhancing customer experience and future-proofing the system for digital signage. The solution includes AI-driven price validation, visual error detection and role-specific insights with human-in-the-loop and responsible AI safeguards.

Alfered the Gen-AI powered agent, helps the Store Customer Platform team streamline operations, enhance customer experiences and ensure pricing and promotional compliance—delivering faster, smarter support across every store. It ensures that the printed ticket's mathematical logic is accurate, as errors can occur where the discount amount does not align with the percentage discount displayed on the ticket.

Key Features include:

• AI-Driven Ticket Validation: Automating the validation of the pre-print tickets by checking for price discrepancies and ensuring mathematical accuracy.
• Visual Error Detection for UAT Tickets: Assist in identifying visual inconsistencies between designed pdf versions of tickets and their printed counterparts.
• Automated data Analysis: Analyse files providing insights, answering queries and extracting relevant information to support decision-making.
• Batch Processing Insights: Monitor and report on ticket batch processing offering visibility into workload and operational trends.
• Role-Specific outputs: Tailor responses to individuals based on their role ensuring relevant and actionable insights.
• Human-in-the-loop validation: Ensuring accuracy and reliability of GenAI output through periodic reviews.
• Responsible AI Compliance: Ensure ethical, accurate and unbiased performance while adhering to regulatory requirements
• Data Security and Privacy: Incorporate techniques to handle sensitive information securely, including detecting and masking PII data to ensure compliance with privacy standards.

The Impact

• Increased Store Efficiency: Alfred automates routine tasks like pricing checks, label generation and knowledge retrieval—freeing up store teams to focus on customer service and reducing operational overhead.
• Stronger Compliance & Accuracy: By embedding compliance rules into automated workflows, Alfred ensures pricing, promotions and communications are accurate and aligned with regulatory and brand standards.
• Elevated Customer Experience: Personalised in-store experiences through dynamic signage, tailored promotions and smart navigation.

Penrith City Council, a leading local government organization in New South Wales, Australia, partnered with HCLTech to modernize how employees access enterprise knowledge across the organization.

Using Microsoft Copilot Studio, SharePoint Online and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), HCLTech developed an AI-powered knowledge assistant that transformed traditional document search into an intelligent conversational experience. The solution enables employees to quickly access trusted policies, procedures and operational guidance while reducing dependency on internal support teams and establishing a scalable foundation for responsible AI adoption.

The Challenge

Penrith City Council's employees rely on a large repository of policies, procedures and operational documents to support day-to-day decision-making and deliver essential community services. However, locating relevant information within SharePoint often required employees to search across multiple documents or contact internal support teams for assistance.

As the organization's knowledge base continued to grow, repetitive policy enquiries, inconsistent responses and manual knowledge validation impacted employee productivity and increased the workload on subject matter experts.

To improve operational efficiency and employee experience, the Council sought an AI-powered knowledge search solution that could deliver fast, accurate and trustworthy responses while maintaining governance, security and responsible AI practices within its Microsoft ecosystem.

The Solution

HCLTech designed and implemented an enterprise AI knowledge assistant using Microsoft Copilot Studio with a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture. The solution securely retrieves information from approved SharePoint repositories and delivers grounded, context-aware responses through a natural language conversational interface.

To support responsible AI adoption, HCLTech incorporated confidence-based response handling, intelligent fallback mechanisms and a human-in-the-loop review process. A reviewer application built on Microsoft Power Apps enables subject matter experts to validate responses, update knowledge sources and continuously improve AI performance. Automated workflows for query logging, notifications and escalations further strengthen governance while creating a scalable framework for future enterprise AI initiatives.

Key Features include:

• AI-Driven Ticket Validation: Automating the validation of the pre-print tickets by checking for price discrepancies and ensuring mathematical accuracy.
• Visual Error Detection for UAT Tickets: Assist in identifying visual inconsistencies between designed pdf versions of tickets and their printed counterparts.
• Automated data Analysis: Analyse files providing insights, answering queries and extracting relevant information to support decision-making.
• Batch Processing Insights: Monitor and report on ticket batch processing offering visibility into workload and operational trends.
• Role-Specific outputs: Tailor responses to individuals based on their role ensuring relevant and actionable insights.
• Human-in-the-loop validation: Ensuring accuracy and reliability of GenAI output through periodic reviews.
• Responsible AI Compliance: Ensure ethical, accurate and unbiased performance while adhering to regulatory requirements
• Data Security and Privacy: Incorporate techniques to handle sensitive information securely, including detecting and masking PII data to ensure compliance with privacy standards.

The Impact

The AI-powered knowledge assistant delivered measurable improvements during the Proof of Concept, demonstrating the potential to transform enterprise knowledge management across the Council.

The solution achieved:

• 70% reduction in repetitive policy enquiries to internal support teams (expected based on PoC outcomes)
• Faster access to trusted policies, procedures and operational guidance through conversational AI
• Improved response accuracy with grounded answers sourced from approved SharePoint content
• Stronger governance through human-in-the-loop validation and continuous knowledge improvement
• A scalable, low-code platform that establishes the foundation for Microsoft 365 Copilot and future enterprise AI adoption

Fonterra, a New Zealand-based multinational dairy co-operative and the world's largest dairy exporter responsible for 30% of global dairy exports, partnered with HCLTech to revolutionize its export documentation validation process across 140+ countries.

Using Microsoft Azure and generative AI, HCLTech developed an intelligent automation solution that transformed labor-intensive manual validation into streamlined straight-through processing — growing trade volumes while reducing payment risks and operational costs across Fonterra’s global supply chain.

The Challenge

Fonterra faced critical operational challenges managing payment risks across diverse international markets with varying credit environments and complex legal frameworks. The company's reliance on LC for payment guarantees created bottlenecks due to inconsistent, semi-structured SWIFT messages that varied dramatically across countries and banking institutions.

Manual validation of these required highly experienced staff and was becoming unsustainable as trading volumes expanded. The process was particularly challenging given the complexity of multi-product transactions and frequent data changes throughout the sales lifecycle.

The Objective

Recognizing the need for digital transformation to support its growth trajectory, Fonterra sought to automate its LC validation process while maintaining the highest standards of accuracy and compliance. To build on its existing Microsoft technology ecosystem, Fonterra partnered with HCLTech to develop an intelligent, scalable AI solution that could handle the complexity of global trade documentation while providing enterprise-grade security and reliability — so Fonterra could eliminate processing bottlenecks and enable its skilled workforce to focus on higher-value strategic activities.

The Solution

HCLTech delivered a sophisticated GenAI solution built on Microsoft Azure using microservices and event-driven architecture. It leveraged advanced AI capabilities to automatically extract, compare and validate LC data against Fonterra's SAP GTS records, handling the complexity of semi-structured SWIFT messages.

The solution featured intelligent document processing that adapted to:

• Varying international banking formats
• Real-time validation against multiple data sources
• Seamless integration with existing enterprise systems

The platform's responsible AI framework ensured data privacy and security while scaling from single-product transactions to complex multi-product scenarios.

The Impact

The AI-powered solution delivered transformative results that established new operational benchmarks for global trade processing for Fonterra across 140+ countries. The solution achieved:

The solution achieved:

• Reduces barriers to international commerce: 95% automated straight-through processing for Red Lane transactions
• Significant reduction in staffing requirements: Over 85% accuracy in validation reducing manual intervention
• Enhanced processes: 15% reduction in processing time
• Reduced risk: Improved documentation compliance and reduced payment risks
• Improved employee morale: Redeployment of skilled staff to higher-value strategic roles, improving job satisfaction