🚀 Customer Spotlight Recap: Build vs. Buy — How Motorola Solutions Scaled Enterprise AI Support with Moveworks

Huge thanks to everyone who joined Sarah Chudawala, Senior Customer Success Manager at Moveworks, and Joe Birney, Director of IT Product Enablement at Motorola Solutions, for an honest and insightful look at Motorola’s journey from a homegrown support bot to a scalable, enterprise-ready AI assistant: Echo, powered by Moveworks.

Here’s your quick recap with key takeaways 👇

🧩 The “Build vs. Buy” Moment

Many organizations have the talent to build internal tools. The bigger question becomes:
Is what you’ve built keeping pace with employee expectations and AI innovation?

For Motorola Solutions, the turning point was clear:

• Their existing bot (TechBot) was powerful — but menu-driven and limited to predefined responses
• Employees increasingly expected natural, conversational interactions
• Leadership introduced an aggressive timeline to evolve their AI strategy
   

That’s when the conversation shifted from “Can we build this?” to “Should we?”

✅ When They Chose to Buy, They Chose Moveworks

Joe shared that Motorola had the development talent to build something new — but not within the six-month window set by leadership.

After evaluating options and speaking with peers already using the platform, the decision became clear:

They chose to buy — and they chose Moveworks — to deliver:

• A conversational, agentic experience
• A unified front door for employee support
• A solution that could scale across departments
• A launch that met both timeline and budget expectations
   

Echo became that next-generation assistant, built on Moveworks.

🤖 The Foundation: What TechBot Achieved

Before Echo, TechBot played a meaningful role at Motorola:

• Started as an IT-focused support bot
• Expanded to 500+ skills across the company
• Reduced context-switching by bringing support into chat
• Became the safe channel for employees to experiment with LLM technology
   

TechBot was successful — and adoption accelerated significantly when employees wanted secure access to generative AI tools.

But expectations evolved.

⚙️ From Menu-Based Bot to Agentic Assistant

TechBot relied on predefined flows and keyword triggers.

Echo introduced:

• Natural language conversations
• A cleaner, more intuitive interface
• A shift from “getting an answer” to “getting the issue resolved”
   

As Joe emphasized:
Speed doesn’t matter if the answer isn’t accurate. Trust is everything.

🛠️ The Migration: High Pressure, High Stakes

This wasn’t a simple upgrade.

Motorola had to migrate hundreds of automations into a new architecture while also launching initial agentic use cases:

• Focused first on IT and HR (based on ticket volume)
• Delivered 10 initial agentic use cases
• Rebuilt 300+ skills under a compressed timeline
• Met the deadline — and stayed on budget
   

Post-launch, the team shifted into tech debt cleanup and continuous improvement mode.

Joe credited the development team’s velocity — and admitted the best leadership move he made was “getting out of their way.”

📊 Measuring Success: Trust + Ticket Reduction

Motorola tracks several signals, but one stands above the rest:

📉 Help ticket creation volume

The long-term goal: drive ticket creation as close to zero as possible by resolving issues before employees need to submit one.

They also monitor:

• Customer satisfaction trends
• Thumbs-down feedback (investigating root causes immediately)
• Adoption growth across the company
   

Currently, nearly three-quarters of employees have engaged with Echo in some form.

The guiding principle:
If trust drops, adoption drops.

🧭 How They Decide What Comes Next

With Echo’s success came an influx of new ideas.

To avoid rebuilding low-impact automations (a lesson from TechBot), they implemented a structured prioritization model:

1. Formal intake through a request form
2. ROI + business impact evaluation
3. CX review and stakeholder alignment
4. Sprint-based backlog execution
    

With a lean team of full-time developers plus community contributors, velocity remains high — but focus is intentional.

🔮 What’s Ahead

Echo’s footprint is expanding beyond IT and HR into:

• Supply chain
• Finance
• Engineering
• Marketing
• Sales
• Legal
   

The team is also exploring:

• Deeper agentic workflows (e.g., automated environment setup for developers)
• Proactive onboarding outreach
• Longer-term possibilities for secure external-facing experiences
   

The energy across departments is strong — and the “art of the possible” conversations are just getting started.

🧠 Lessons Learned

Joe closed with reflections he’d share with any team facing a similar journey:

• Bring customer experience expertise in early
• Plan for and document tech debt during fast builds
• Engage data owners to ensure information stays accurate
• Prioritize quality over speed to protect trust
   

📺 Missed the live session?

 You can watch the full conversation on-demand here: https://www.moveworks.com/us/en/resources/webinars/motorola-solutions-build-vs-buy-enterprise-ai-case-study

Have your own build vs. buy story? Or lessons learned from evolving an internal AI strategy?

We’d love to hear what worked — and what you’d do differently 👇