Staffbase gains client trust, security, scalability with Azure OpenAI Service

Staffbase needed a suite of AI services that would provide its clients with highly secure and compliant access to generative AI capabilities without additional apps or subscriptions.

The company built its AI assistant, Staffbase Companion, on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), gaining the flexibility to continuously scale. Staffbase Companion runs on GPT-3.5 Turbo but will soon move to GPT-4o mini.

By building its AI-based offerings using Microsoft solutions, Staffbase can help clients enhance internal communication with quick content generation, summarization, translation, and future capabilities—and remain confident in their data protection.

Regardless of the industry, businesses are built on relationships. Company culture comes up in every job interview for a reason. Companies that establish clear internal communication throughout their organization are more unified, motivated, and ultimately more productive. But today’s work-from-anywhere world makes these transparent lines of communication harder to maintain and even more crucial to business success. Companies need to keep employees on the same page, empower each person’s sense of purpose, and nurture a strong community.

Staffbase helps them do that. Over 2,000 clients—including Samsung, Domino’s, Aldi, DHL, and Sephora—use Staffbase cloud solutions to inspire their employees through communication. As Staffbase Senior Product Manager Mikael Head explains, “We see communication as a strategic tool and a competitive advantage for companies. That’s why we empower companies to build narratives that help them succeed and achieve their goals.”

Staffbase draws on powerful tools to better connect its clients with their employees, including a branded employee app, intranet, email, text messaging, digital signage, and Microsoft 365 integrations, all of which a client can manage through Staffbase’s cloud platform. Perhaps the most transformative offering the Germany-based company provides is Staffbase Companion, an enterprise-grade AI assistant that puts information at employees’ fingertips to help them work more efficiently and collaboratively.

The innovative solution includes two main components—a generative AI writing assistant and an information-synthesizing chatbot that will be available soon. “Content owners use Staffbase Companion Editor to help create content, and people in all sorts of roles can use Companion Search,” explains Staffbase Product Manager, Ruud Brok. “The chatbot can take multiple pages and pieces of content, identify the interesting parts, and use those in an answer. It evaluates all the available information related to the specific question and then generates the answer. You don’t have to comb through multiple pages. The chatbot does it for you in zero time basically.”

By empowering companies to deliver distinct, ownable messaging, Staffbase helps them enhance employee engagement, streamline communication processes, and foster a more connected workforce. To develop and support its AI initiatives and products like Staffbase Companion, the company uses Azure OpenAI Service.

We consider it a perfect combination of innovative OpenAI models and the Microsoft infrastructure and everything that comes with it—enterprise readiness, security, and privacy.

Mikael Head, Senior Product Manager, Staffbase

Building Staffbase Companion with Azure OpenAI Service

A longtime Staffbase partner, Microsoft emerged as the definitive option when it was time to choose a suite of AI services that would underpin Staffbase Companion. “We wanted to simplify our tech stack and migrated almost the entire stack to Microsoft a couple of years ago,” says Head. “It’s natural to have our infrastructure in Azure for other reasons as well. Microsoft is a household name in internal communication and the enterprise segment, and most of our clients are heavily invested in the Microsoft product ecosystem. It’s also a definite advantage that all the software plays well together. And, of course, the quality needs to be top-notch, and Microsoft offers very high-quality cloud-based solutions.”

Staffbase considers communication key to business success—and security the ring that ensures that key doesn’t wind up in the wrong hands. As Head emphasizes, “We’re certified by ISO, SOC 2, and many other certificates to show that we take security seriously. That’s a big driver for our clients.” Building its offerings on Microsoft solutions increases Staffbase clients’ confidence in their data protection. “We often get asked if we store the questions our chatbot handles and if they’re used to train the models,” says Brok. “The answer is no, and we can back that assertion with official statements from Microsoft, which really helps.”

In addition to client assurance, using Azure OpenAI Service and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) provides flexibility for Staffbase to continuously scale its offerings. Staffbase Companion currently runs on GPT-3.5 Turbo and will soon move to GPT-4o mini, opening the door to new capabilities for the AI assistant. “It’s very valuable to be able to change models and experiment with different models and applications so easily,” says Head. “We use Kubernetes to manage applications. We consider it a perfect combination of innovative OpenAI models and the Microsoft infrastructure and everything that comes with it—enterprise readiness, security, and privacy. And of course, the brand name of Microsoft in the enterprise world is highly valued.”

AI-powered communication in action

Using Staffbase solutions facilitates communication across industries, including automotive, education, energy, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, and retail. The platform also facilitates communication across cultures. “A lot of clients benefit every day from our Azure AI translation capabilities. Many of them operate in 20-plus markets and might need to produce content in 20-plus languages,” says Head. “Content creators use the Azure-provided machine translation to create the right language versions for all of their audiences in different markets, straight from the get-go.”

With its generative AI capabilities, Staffbase Companion Editor can also cure writer’s block in more than 180 languages. “You can use Companion Editor to create different drafts on a specific topic, get ideas, and help the creative process,” says Head. “Often it’s used to optimize content, like changing the tone slightly or making content shorter or longer.” Staffbase relies on Azure data privacy protections to help ensure that clients retain ownership of the content they generate. Says Brok, “Companion Editor does not train language models using your company information from the documents you summarize or create.” This ability for companies to retain ownership of their content is vital to retaining their data integrity and their competitive edge in the age of AI.

The conversation is still evolving

As a company driven to transform communication and inspire change, Staffbase always looks toward the future, an approach that aligns perfectly with its cloud provider. “It’s really nice that the Microsoft and OpenAI collaboration means that the models that OpenAI releases also become available through the Azure environment at almost the same time,” says Head. “I trust the Microsoft and OpenAI partnership to be the cornerstone of future AI development.”

Never content to rest on the breadth of its offerings, Staffbase finds value in the potential growth that Azure supports. “Scalability is important. We can count on our performance and don’t suffer when other customers also have high workloads,” states Brok. “Azure OpenAI Service scales with your usage. If you grow, the platform grows with you.”

Scalability is important. We can count on our performance and don’t suffer when other customers also have high workloads. Azure OpenAI Service scales with your usage. If you grow, the platform grows with you.

Ruud Brok, Product Manager, Staffbase

Keeping companies connected

In a digital world so prone to overdiversification and distraction, Staffbase remains focused on one mission despite its ambition. “When you look at the playing field of internal communication platforms, the secret sauce that sets us apart from the others is our focus on communication,” says Brok. “We don’t try to be that one app to rule them all. We really focus on empowering companies to transform internal communication into a strategic advantage.”

Whether it’s the never-ending influx of information, fragmented communication channels, or the rise of remote work, it’s never been more difficult for companies to maintain focused communication across their organization. But it’s also never been more important to keep employees informed, engaged, and connected. Backed by the robust security and functionality of Azure OpenAI Service, Staffbase has positioned itself to help enterprise organizations meet the demands of modern communication. As Brok puts it, “We inspire people to achieve great things together.”