The 24-year-old economist Konstantin Garbe comes from Wuppertal and works for the software developing company Cognigy in Düsseldorf.

"I left the university after my Bachelor degree", Konstantin Garbe tells, who has studied economics from 2015 until 2018 at the University of Wuppertal. Already during his studies the active student worked as a student trainee at thyssenkrupp and was responsible for several tasks in the HR-department of the corporate group. One of his tasks was to find a Chatbot producer and through that he eventually found his current position as a sales representative at the software developing company Cognigy in Düsseldorf. "This is a message that I would like to hand over to all students - learn through internships and student trainee jobs and get to know what you enjoy and where your strengths lie. And even, if you have a hard time with a specific task and you do not like it, you still learned something", he laughingly says. At thyssenkrupp he searched for a suitable software and the then 22-year-old found Cognigy. He contacted the company and got more and more enthusiastic about the business idea, so that he could image working at Cognigy. Finally, Garbe had the courage to directly ask the founder Philipp Helteweg, whether he could have a professional future et Cognigy. "2018 he then contacted me: 'Do you want to start, we now need some people', since Cognigy finished his first round of financing then and started to grow.", he said excitedly.

Virtual Agents and intelligent Chatbots for customer and employee service

What makes the company Cognigy so interesting for young people? "Everybody knows language assistants like Siri or Amazon Alexa. These are software programs with which we can speak and which enable us to communicate with a device through natural language", the slaes representative explains. "The software programs are called "virtual agents" in our world, meaning Artificial Intelligences, with whom we can communicate. Mathmatic algorithms analyse the incoming natural language and execute certain actions through the extracted information, which then leads to a dialogue. Let us look at the weather request as an example. Cognigy's software Cognigy.Al analyses the incoming text (the language) and recognizes the question 'How shall the weather be in Wuppertal?', the intention of the user to gain weather information for Wuppertal." Through programming interfaces (so-called API's) the software is now able to access weather data from e.g. wetter.com and offers the correct answer to the question. "This means", Garbe explains, "companies use our software Cognigy.Al to develop virtual agents for the own, company specific applications." He also has application suggestions for universities. "The university could e.g. develop virtual agents for international students, that could answer questions all around the studies in several languages." The university then only had to decide how the service could be retrieved, through Facebook Messenger, through a language assistant or eventually through both.

Cognigy focuses on big corpate groups such as Bosch, Henkel and Daimler, "Every company has different requirements and aims. To enable that our software can be used successfully, she has to be very flexibly integrable with the already existing IT-infrastructure such as e.g. CRM-. ERP- or Call-Center systems." To support customers in their projects, Cognigy has build up the largest partner network in the sector with over 60 regional and international partners.