This case study is set in June 2022, two and a half years since Raffles Quay Asset Management (RQAM) had rolled out its new vision in preparation for positioning itself for the workplace of the future. RQAM had been established in 2001 to manage and market the commercial properties developed by Asia's leading developers. The new vision provided the 'north star' for the whole organisation and transformed how RQAM managed tenant relationships. It also revolutionised RQAM's approach to commercial real estate management. The new vision leveraged technology opportunities and addressed the needs of RQAM's various stakeholders from its tenants to the community. The RQAM leaders crafted a strategy to deliver the vision within five years. To support the implementation of the vision, the leaders drove significant interventions, of which, one intervention was to align employees across the whole organisation with the 'strategy on a page'.

The case is set in May 2021 and talks about a Singapore-based small-medium enterprise decision science company called Blackbox (BB) and how it used conversational AI, human-centered design, and a technology innovation partner to design and develop a chatbot that helped its clients understand data insights with the language of everyday conversations. BB generated vast data through opinion surveys and complex market analyses for its clients. While dashboards and reports provided a glimpse into that data, these tools did not necessarily help clients make immediate data-driven business decisions. Analysts would spend time on the phone answering simple and often repetitive questions to explain the key findings. BB decided to build a chatbot that could handle natural language queries independently to reduce the time of live support calls and allow even non-specialized users to access data insights directly. The CEO, David Black, and his team, led by Chief Operating Officer, Saurabh Sardana, embarked on designing a conversational data platform to provide improved services to clients at scale. However, how could BB execute this idea efficiently without an internal technical team specializing in building chatbots? How could the company avoid the pitfalls of typical commercial chatbots that fail to engage users? How could Black and his team design a conversational data platform that efficiently imitated human-to-human conversations, which clients could use independently? Could this new platform help the company become a differentiator in the market?