Southeastern’s first AI Agent live in 3 weeks

The challenge

Southeastern’s Customer Relations team struggled with manual, time-consuming processes that drained capacity and slowed service. Tasks like major incident reporting could take days and involve multiple team members, while employees wanted to spend less time on repetitive work and more on meaningful customer interactions.

Key challenges

• Employee experience impacted by repetitive work. Southeastern’s customer relations teams were overwhelmed with repetitive, low-value tasks that consumed time and energy.
• Manual, time-consuming processes slowing service. Critical tasks like reporting on major incidents were taking several days of effort, across multiple different team members, diverting staff from customer-facing responsibilities.
• Desire to deliver ROI through AI - within weeks, not months. Speed was critical. They wanted something quickly to show proof of concept minimising the gap between investment and ROI.
• Build the business case for AI and bring people on the journey. AI needed to be seen as an enabler, not a threat. The team at Southeastern needed to demonstrate the value of AI and how AI would remove repetitive tasks and bring back the joy in their roles.

The solution

AI Unlocked

UP3 ran a series of short, focused discovery workshops with Southeastern’s Customer Relations team to identify pain points and manual processes that would benefit from automation. From these sessions, UP3 and Southeastern identified 6 AI agent use cases, each addressing a specific business challenge.

AI Agent: Major Incident Report Generator

The first AI Agent, Major Incident Report Generator, went live in just 3 weeks. It automates the creation of major incident reports, which are shared with senior stakeholders across the business.

Previously, compiling these reports involved multiple individuals reviewing hundreds of cases manually and producing lengthy documents. Now, leveraging connected data within ServiceNow CSM, the time taken to complete the process has been reduced from 96 hours to just 4 minutes.

Other AI agents in development include:

1. Action Summarisation – adds actionable insights to case summaries.
2. Duplicate Payment Claim Identifier – reduces fraud and manual effort.
3. Urgent Case Classification - ensure accurate, timely, reporting when needed.
4. Automated Case Classification – ensure accurate, compliant reporting.
5. Automated QA – validates corporate communications against industry requirements before sending

Which was possible with UP3’s deep rail industry expertise and an established partnership with Southeastern

Together, these AI agents will expand Southeastern’s capacity, speed up responses, and improve service, while giving employees a more enjoyable work life and freeing them to focus on delivering excellent customer support.