As digital adoption accelerated across customer-facing channels, two global organizations — one in Fintech, the other in Retail Fulfillment — partnered with 18North to design and deploy conversational BOTs capable of intelligent customer interaction, automated support resolution, and seamless handoffs to backend services.

By tailoring each solution to the platform ecosystem and user expectations of the respective domain, 18North leveraged the best-suited conversational AI tools — Google Dialogflow for fintech, and Amazon Lex for retail/logistics workflows

• Fintech BOT (Dialogflow):
  • Client: A digital payments organization in the UAE with wallet, remittance, and gateway services.

  • Need: 24×7 chatbot support for Tier-1 queries, onboarding, balance checks, and regional compliance — across English and Arabic interfaces.

• Retail Fulfillment BOT (Amazon Lex):
  • Client: A Dubai-based retail group needing BOT-driven automation of order fulfillment, status tracking, and customer communication.
  • Need: Voice/text-based interactions via websites and future Alexa/SMS channels, integrated with back-office systems.

• Multilingual Demand: Arabic and English had to be fully supported in the fintech use case.

• API Fulfillment: Bots needed secure, low-latency access to existing REST APIs.

• Channel Versatility: Bots were expected to work across mobile web, desktop portals, and future IVR/voice systems.

• Cloud-Native Design: Each client preferred a scalable, serverless, cloud-native footprint.
• Domain-Specific Logic: Fintech required transactional workflows; retail needed real-time updates tied to order lifecycle.

18North implemented two independent, domain-specific conversational platforms:

A. Fintech BOT – Dialogflow + AWS Lambda

• Platform: Google Dialogflow Standard Edition

• Features:
  • 50+ engineered intents including “wallet top-up,” “track remittance,” “agent assistance.”

  • Multilingual NLP: Enabled seamless English and Arabic transitions.

  • Contextual handling for multi-turn dialogues using Dialogflow contexts.

• Fulfillment Layer:
  • AWS Lambda for API orchestration via secure webhooks.

  • Payload generation, response formatting, and encryption.

• Omnichannel:
  • Integrated with customer portal, mobile web, and WhatsApp via Twilio.

• Security & Logging:
  • API key validation, session token management, AWS CloudWatch logging.

B. Retail Fulfillment BOT – Amazon Lex + AWS Backend

• Platform: Amazon Lex

• Features:
  • Intent modeling for order lookup, rescheduling, FAQ handling, and shipment tracking.

  • Configured slot filling for guided, voice-like conversations.

• Integration:
  • Lambda-backed fulfillment triggered business workflows in real time.

  • Future provisioning for Alexa and IVR use cases.

• Voice/NLP Design:
  • Tailored for transactional query formats and eCommerce vernacular.

  • Amazon Polly used for speech response prototyping.

By leveraging the right conversational stack for the right domain, 18North delivered AI-powered bots that not only automated customer support, but also scaled across cloud infrastructure, language barriers, and transactional complexity. These pre-LLM BOTs remain extensible — ready to evolve into hybrid or LLM-augmented assistants in future rollouts.