OneDigital leverages Microsoft Azure to scale consulting power with AI Coworkers

OneDigital needed a faster, smarter way to gather personalized insights for client meetings, as manual research was time-consuming and risked underprepared, less impactful engagements.

OneDigital used Microsoft Azure, and the Azure Innovate offer to co-develop custom AI agents with Data Science Dojo, leveraging Azure OpenAI and Ejento AI to streamline research, boost consultant productivity, and deliver smarter client insights.

The AI solution saved OneDigital 1,000 person-hours annually, enabling faster, personalized client briefs in minutes, boosting consultant productivity, enhancing client engagement, and improving retention through strategic, high-impact interactions.

OneDigital is a strategic advisory firm that helps businesses and individuals with insurance, financial services, and human resources consulting. Focused on helping clients achieve health, success, and financial security, OneDigital also prioritizes building an internal environment where its talented team can do their best work. With a forward-looking approach to artificial intelligence and automation, OneDigital is enhancing internal workflows, improving productivity, and setting new standards for service delivery through smart technology.

With a bold goal to scale the consulting power of its people, OneDigital set out to transform how its teams prepare for and deliver high-impact client engagements. The vision was clear: empower consultants to spend more time on strategic thinking, human connection, and delivering value—while reducing the time spent on labor-intensive research and manual insight-building.

The challenge: Elevating consultant preparation and client engagement

The OneDigital benefits consulting team regularly faced the challenge of thoroughly preparing for strategic client meetings. Consultants spent hours or days conducting deep research on their clients' industries, benefits strategies, market trends, recent organizational developments, and individual client stakeholders. This manual, time-consuming process limited consultants' ability to consistently deliver tailored and strategic insights across a growing client base.

With an expanding number of engagements, the team needed a smarter way to quickly gather relevant, personalized information. The existing approach risked consultants entering meetings underprepared, with generic information that didn't clearly demonstrate OneDigital’s strategic advantage. To enhance service quality and client satisfaction, consultants required intelligent workflow automation that could rapidly synthesize comprehensive client insights—freeing their time to focus on relationship-building, strategic advisory, and personalized recommendations.

Collaboration and innovation through Microsoft Azure Innovate

OneDigital partnered with Microsoft to create a solution and find the right partner to meet their AI needs. By securing Microsoft funding through Azure Innovate, a Microsoft offer that enables AI-led transformation, OneDigital was able to offset the engagement cost and co-develop a custom large language model (LLM) with Data Science Dojo, an experienced Azure partner with AI expertise, tailored to their goals.

“Our initial connection with OneDigital came through [the account manager] at Microsoft, under the Azure Innovate [offer]. This streamlined approach—from easy nomination and prompt funding—allowed us to efficiently understand OneDigital’s needs and bring AI coworkers into production faster.” Arham Akheel, Senior Solutions Architect at Data Science Dojo, stated. Thanks to years of experience using the Microsoft Azure platform, OneDigital trusted its proven technology. They chose Azure because its generative AI solutions offered advantages. Azure provided a comprehensive suite of AI tools and services, including Azure OpenAI Service, which made AI development accessible with easy-to-use APIs allowing the OneDigital team to integrate advanced AI functionality into their existing environment.

“Through Azure Innovate, we co-developed a custom LLM agent platform with Data Science Dojo, revolutionizing our innovation. Their AI expertise and swift adaptation to our industry have unlocked new business capabilities. We look forward to continuing this partnership," Vinay Gidwaney, Chief Product Officer at OneDigital stated.

OneDigital identified Ejento AI, a no-code AI agent building platform powered by Azure, to build AI agents for knowledge workers. “Ejento AI agents ensure security, privacy, compliance, data governance, guardrails, evaluation and interoperability while drastically improving productivity of knowledge workers.” explained Raja Iqbal, Chief Data Scientist.

“We saw an opportunity to leverage Azure’s ecosystem to build AI agents to support OneDigital for a wide range of use cases like writing proposals, doing market research, responding to RFPs and providing assistance to employees,” Senior Solutions Architect at Data Science Dojo stated.

OneDigital leveraged Azure to deploy the AI agent building platform in their cloud tenant. This platform integrates key Azure services including Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Foundry, Azure Document Intelligence, Azure Service Bus, Azure Bot Service, Azure AI Search, App Services, Microsoft Entra, Azure Front Door, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Container Service, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Communication Service, Azure CDN, and Cosmos DB. To ensure security and performance, OneDigital relied on Azure Database for PostgreSQL, which offers built-in security, automated backups, and scalable infrastructure. This setup allowed OneDigital to maintain high availability and protect their cloud and AI investments.

Ejento AI is a licensed solution available on the Azure Marketplace as a SaaS product. With seamless deployment through the Azure Marketplace, users can set it up with a single click. The solution was designed to:

Handle a range of employee queries related to benefits such as health insurance, retirement plans and disability insurance
Consistently provide the most accurate and up-to-date information
Offer multilingual support
Provide simple and clear language, ensuring that all employees can easily access the information they needed regardless of their language or comprehension level

“Through Azure Innovate, we co-developed a custom LLM agent platform with Data Science Dojo, revolutionizing our innovation. Their AI expertise and swift adaptation to our industry have unlocked new business capabilities. We look forward to continuing this partnership.”

Vinay Gidwaney, Chief Product Officer, OneDigital

Productivity improvement

OneDigital partnered with Data Science Dojo to develop a team of AI Coworkers, specially trained chatbots equipped with proprietary data and customized instructions tailored to OneDigital and its clients. Among them is Ben, an AI benefits expert designed to support the consulting team. Ben quickly synthesizes extensive industry data, client background details, stakeholder insights, and strategic benefits recommendations.

Since its introduction, Ben has significantly boosted the productivity and effectiveness of OneDigital’s benefits specialists, delivering faster, smarter solutions for clients.

Consultants who previously spent hours or even days manually compiling research now receive comprehensive, personalized engagement briefs in minutes.

Azure’s secure, compliant cloud infrastructure ensures sensitive client information remains confidential, protected, and fully compliant with stringent data privacy regulations. Automated backups, security controls, and scalable cloud computing resources guarantee reliability, security, and continuous availability—especially crucial during peak client engagement periods or multiple simultaneous client meetings.

By automating this intensive research workload, OneDigital consultants reclaimed substantial amounts of valuable time—estimated at hundreds of person-hours per year. This newfound efficiency allowed consultants to focus deeply on client relationships, strategic advisory, and delivering more targeted, meaningful insights. As a result, client engagements became consistently personalized, high-impact, and strategically relevant, directly translating into stronger client satisfaction, improved retention, and enhanced competitive differentiation for OneDigital.

Ultimately, the deployment of Ben streamlined consulting operations, empowered the consulting team to engage strategically rather than tactically, and elevated the overall client experience—turning routine preparation tasks into opportunities for deeper human connection and strategic value.

Evolving relationships

OneDigital will continue to innovate with Microsoft Azure, using the power of AI and Machine Learning to remain at the forefront of improving employee benefits. Moving forward, OneDigital is exploring a Proposal Writer, which generates detailed proposals using past submissions and marketing materials—already a hit with the sales team.