CLIENT STORY

Revolutionizing renewables innovation with AI-powered knowledge discovery

AI Assistant Accelerates Innovation at Neste

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Neste embarks on a new journey, using Generative AI in innovation and technology development to augment information discovery and creation processes with a new AI-powered knowledge assistant solution.

The challenge

Neste, a global leader in renewable and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and renewable diesel, is fundamentally transforming from a traditional oil refiner into a provider of sustainable solutions. This shift requires extensive innovation as the company explores future sustainable raw materials, refining processes, technologies, and new business models to support a low-carbon future.

Furthermore, leveraging such complex and scattered information for decision-making and new knowledge creation would require further manual synthesis and consolidation of information.

To improve this time-to-information challenge, Neste Innovation and Technology Digitalization team partnered with Futurice and Recordly to develop an AI-powered research assistant. The goal was not just to improve search but to create a conversational experience that enables experts to find relevant and contextualized answers to their questions and create new knowledge for future use.

 

"Neste’s Technology and Innovation unit, consisting of leading experts in chemical research, technology, and engineering, plays a crucial role in the company’s transformation journey. Finding precise information quickly and efficiently from a massive, complex, and scattered knowledge base has always been a challenge for experts."

– Arto Heiska, Vice President, Process Technology, Neste

What we did

Futurice and Recordly collaborated with Neste to design and build a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solution with a conversational user interface. Experts can initiate and maintain multiple natural-language conversations and receive precise answers to their questions, enriched with references to the original documents.

To ensure accurate, efficient, and scalable knowledge retrieval, we designed a state-of-the-art hybrid search engine using semantic and BM25 search techniques that searches across a vast and well-curated corpus of research literature. The search uses agentic intelligence to improve search queries to find the most relevant information, helping experts to discover trustworthy, high-quality results.

Using our use case discovery and design framework, we were able to actively engage the end users in shaping the solution and implementing a robust evaluation framework to measure the relevancy, correctness, and faithfulness of AI-generated responses.

To bring this all together, we designed an intuitive conversational user experience that encourages dialogue between the user and the solution, maintaining the history and contextual memory of the discussions across topics.

"To further enhance response accuracy and relevance, we integrated contextual ranking, a cutting-edge technique from Anthropic on top of the standard RAG approach.This improved the system's ability to surface the most relevant insights."

– Rasmus Toivanen, AI CTO, Recordly

Why it matters

By leveraging AI to automate knowledge discovery, Neste can improve efficiency and productivity in Innovation and Technology Development. The solution accelerates decision-making, enhances collaboration, and helps Neste maintain its competitive edge in renewable technology.

Besides accuracy, explainability and transparency are also of paramount importance for the use of AI in research due to the critical impact on decision-making. The above-mentioned modular architecture and evaluation framework enabled us to experiment with a variety of parameters and language models in rapid iterations until we achieved measurably high benchmarks on these metrics.

"As part of the solution, we also established a state-of-the-art Gen AI foundation architecture consisting of highly abstracted, modular, and scalable components in terms of a re-usable design and code blueprint, opening up further opportunities for Intelligent Knowledge Agents solutions across Neste." 

– Rupesh More, Digital and AI Excellence Manager, Neste

As the solution introduces a new way of discovering and creating knowledge for Neste, we designed an adoption process involving continuous learning and integration with the existing processes and ways of working to maximize the value creation.

Finally, the established robust architectural foundation and learning and process integration experience will enable us to evolve and scale the solution to meet constantly changing business needs and the rapidly developing GenAI landscape, paving the path for a broader AI-assisted future at Neste.

As AI continues to fundamentally transform scientific research, Neste is positioning itself at the forefront of this evolution through this first milestone in its journey towards a Human-AI collaborative innovation and technology development.

"The solution not only expedites time to information but enables us to be better experts."

– Petri Pulkkinen, Researcher, Neste R&D
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