Adam Kene: “Partnering with Kreoh has been a game-changer for our company.”
With Kreoh, Kene see significant improvement:
“We complete twice the number of projects per day and halve the reviewing time.”
The Client Snapshot:
- Generated benefit: £135m
- Average benefit to clients: £73,000
- Claims submitted: ~2,000
- Customer Satisfaction Level: 4.5*
The Engagement
Kene, multi award-winning R&D funding specialists based in London, became aware of Dublin based Kreoh in late 2023 via LinkedIn. As CEO and founder of “the R&D tax advisers of choice for tech innovators”, Adam Kene was intrigued by Kreoh’s GenAI powered R&D Report Editor, and its bold claims of being able to increase productivity in the mundane.
Moreover, Kreoh’s mission to promote robust, eligible, and compliant technical narratives that could be used to substantiate maximised R&D claims promised an alignment in values too important to overlook. After a short time of interaction, in which Kreoh’s team of experts demonstrated the product’s unique capabilities and passed Kene’s robust supplier screening process, Adam set his team the task of evaluating the true potential of Kreoh’s Multi-AI Report Editor.
Adam placed qualified engineers Vishnu (R&D Manager) and Assel (Technical Consult ant Team Lead) as key testers of Kreoh’s capabilities. With nearly 2 decades of experience in R&D and at least half of those involved in technical reporting, their inquisitive and knowledgeable input was vital in assessing Kreoh’s ungrounded, demo product. Thankfully, as you will see, they were not quite able to achieve an engineer’s favourite style of R&D, testing to destruction.
The Opportunity
Like many R&D tax advisors, Kene’s technical experts are vital players within the overall claim process, and so, their time is also in high demand. Therefore, efficiently extracting the maximum value of their knowledge without impacting the high quality outputs was of core interest to Kene. The two key areas of time input for the technical writers involved:
Drafting Reports: For Kene, one of the more time intensive elements of claim preparation was the crafting of technical narratives. Using skilled writers with technical backgrounds, a well-formed project write up could be produced within 8 hours. Each report would often contain multiple projects, meaning a report could take from a few days to a week to produce. Producing flowing, consistent and grammatically accurate documentation was not always achievable by first draft.
Quality Reviewing: With a focus on quality, Kene employs a 1.5 hour multi-stage review process, with the first step being undertaken by a team leader. The document would then pass through a secondary review stage from senior managers, before the client checks the content. The review process would commonly require looped feedback throughout the stages from client back to writers, taking up valuable hours of team lead and management time.
The Concerns
Having observed its fast growing impact amongst its clients across multiple industries, an AI powered software solution seemed likely to be the next hot topic of the R&D tax industry. As premier advisers to numerous tech firms throughout the UK, Kene believed getting ahead of the curve would be advantageous to both its clients and its writing team.
Well published information surrounding AI’s capabilities promised to reduce the time spent undertaking general information analysis and performing background research. However, in early investigations, Kene quickly found that it could not produce well structured, long form answers, and that it gave no significant increase in overall productivity.
With the use of any solution that required access to highly sensitive information shared with Kene, there were significant concerns surrounding GDPR compliance and data security. Kene were rightly concerned about who could access the information, how it could be used and, especially if it would be training an open AI model.
To protect its clients’ data, Kene believed the only way to make use of AI would involve creating a bespoke LLM system. However, this would come with considerable costs and technological complexity and concerned the writers over job security and the threat of being replaced by AI. This, alongside concerns around GenAI’s tendency to hallucinate information, thus directly impacting quality, meant that to Kene, the drawbacks of AI outweighed the benefits.
The Solution
Despite Kene’s scepticism around AI’s suitability, and genuine concerns around data security and quality, they were intrigued by Kreoh’s approach to its Multi-AI Report Editor. By laying claim to the creation of a secure, GenAI powered Human-augmentation tool that could enhance existing writers’ capabilities, Kreoh needed to impress.
By taking client data security seriously, and understanding the depths of trade secrets shared during technical workshops, Kreoh was able to reassure Kene that the platform would keep their customer’s data genuinely safe. GDPR compliant, SOC II certified and with a system engineered to meet ISO 27001 (a framework for creating and operating Information Security Management Systems (ISMS)), Kreoh’s focus on the most robust forms of data security ensured Kene could progress with a trusted partnership.
In early 2024, after demonstrations to key decision makers within Kene, a Demo version of Kreoh was deployed to selected members of the Technical Team. The team initially tested the system’s capabilities and limitations, providing feedback to Kreoh that it was user friendly and intuitive. Assel noted that Kreoh’s stand out features included “the ability to draft separate sections and select the relevant field of science or technology” and “find specific information from recordings or notes”.
However, it was not all positive. The team found that it would sometimes misapply certain legislation or use generic wording. This was, of course, a core concern due to the importance Kene placed on quality and conformity to legislation, and fears around AI hallucination.
Thankfully, Kreoh was able to demonstrate that these inaccuracies could be easily rectified through the grounding of the platform on Kene’s own high quality historical reports and preferred style. Through a relatively short grounding process, Kreoh created Kene’s bespoke, full use R&D Multi-AI Report Editor.
The grounding process, which involved Kene’s Technical Team providing good and bad writing examples, alongside feedback to Kreoh’s development team, mitigated these problems immediately. Kene’s dedicated Multi-AI Report Editor engine was now grounded, and alongside access to additional features such as the Admin Portal, Assel noticed a significant improvement in quality of output.
The Benefits
With a bespoke Kreoh Multi-AI Report Editor now grounded on Kene’s structure and style, Assel and Vishnu implemented the tool across their team to test quality, productivity and stability. Kreoh’s developers assisted the team with training, allowing them to use and extract the most from the platform.
As Technical Team lead, Assel found that the grounding of the system on Kene’s data “significantly enhanced” the output quality. She stated that the “Draft” function produces a “very solid foundation for further review and revisions”, with first draft of a project, creating content that is “80% ready” for final review. Assel also noted that with the help of the “Ask” tool, she is able to revise and adjust the draft output into a finalised project “within 4 hours”, effectively “halving the time” spent on the drafting stage of the process alone.
The active usage of the tool across the 10 of the 25 strong technical team was analysed using the “Admin” functionality. Here, the team leads noted an increase in quality, throughput and consistency amongst those who used it. Assel and Vishnu both commented on the levelling of variability within the team, noting that the structure, flow and content had significantly improved to a consistent level.
Kreoh’s “Review” functionality further helped reduce the time intensive aspect of reviewing, allowing individual writers to “review” their documents before sending them on to their Team Leads. Assel noted that her time spent reviewing was halved and occurrences of returning documents to writers for amendment significantly reduced. A similar sentiment was echoed by Vishnu, with management now only occasionally returning documents to writers when clients provided additional information. This improvement in content accuracy, structure and grammar not only lead to faster reviews and increased compliance but more flowing documents.
The Future
Kreoh continues to develop the R&D Engine, with the development team currently working towards a major release in Q1 2025 containing exciting new features such as:
- Image and technical schematics interpretation,
- In-interview prompting,
- Drafting Company Background information from websites
- Drafting competent professional bios from LinkedIn profiles.
Adam Kene describes working with Kreoh as a “game-changer” for his company, and is one of many users of Kreoh looking forward to future improvements to the tool. To learn more about how this new way of working can positively impact your business, please contact Ben O’Sullivan at ben@kreoh.com to see it live.
CALL OUT QUOTES
Efficiency: “We complete twice the number of projects per day and halve the reviewing”
Quality: “The quality, structure and flow of the reports has improved, and continues to do so the more time goes on “
Partnership: “The Kreoh team is highly cooperative and responds quickly to any issues. The support provided by the tool is impressive; it saves us time and helps analyse information effectively”
Security: “The Information we work with is sensitive and confidential, so an important advantage of Kreoh is that it does not Leak information to publicly available resources.”
Stability “Kreoh is generally stable, with only occasional minor bugs which are quickly resolved by the developers