GOVERNMENT
NIH Reduces IT Service Ticket Volume with Secure, Air-Gapped Generative AI
Self-Serve AI Business Agent Assists 8,000 NIH Employees in Real-Time, Significantly Reducing IT Ticket Volume
H2O.ai h2oGPTe powers an intranet-native NIH Business Assistant that helps 8,000 users across 28 institutes quickly find answers—deflecting up to 10,000 annual service requests without exposing data outside the NIH network.
Agency Profile
The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) manages hundreds of policies and business system guides that support finance, procurement, travel, budget and acquisitions across 28 institutes.
The Challenge
Support teams field a high volume of repetitive “how‑do‑I?” questions, yet staff and researchers struggle to locate answers scattered across hundreds of SharePoint documents. Search is slow, and keeping institutional knowledge current consumes valuable time.
The Solution
The Office of NIH Business Systems implemented a
Business Assistant chatbot built on H2O.ai h2oGPTe:
Deep document ingestion – Indexes every user guide, training deck and policy in SharePoint.
Trustworthy responses – Summaries are returned with live hyperlinks to the original source.
Context‑aware sessions – Remembers previous questions to personalize follow‑ups.
User‑selected delivery – Answers can be concise bullet points or full narrative.
Role‑based security – Honors SharePoint collections so users see only what they are permitted to view.
Air‑gapped deployment – Runs inside an Oracle Cloud Isolated Region (OCIR) linked to NIH’s intranet so traffic never leaves the NIH network.
Architecture at a Glance
Business Assistant chatbot is embedded directly in the SharePoint intranet.
A resource group hosts h2oGPTe; HTTP calls stay within the air‑gapped customer network.
No external SaaS or public internet connectivity is required, meeting stringent federal security controls.
Results
8,000
NIH users
Self‑serve answers inside existing workflows
10,000
service requests/year
Reducing load on human queues
Time Savings
Support teams focus on higher‑value tasks
Grounded Generation
Standardized responses, traceable to source docs
The chatbot is live across all 28 NIH institutes and continues to expand as new documents and applications are added.
By deploying H2O.ai’s h2oGPTe inside our air‑gapped environment, we delivered a secure Generative AI assistant that surfaces precise policy and procurement answers in seconds—freeing our team to concentrate on mission‑critical improvements instead of repeating FAQs.
— Director ONBS, NIH
Why It Matters for the Public Sector
Meets federal security mandates with on‑prem, air‑gapped architecture—no data leaves agency control.
Rapid time‑to‑value—built and integrated with existing SharePoint in weeks using H2O.ai’s out‑of‑the‑box retrieval‑augmented generation.
Proves Generative AI at scale inside one of the world’s largest research agencies, providing a blueprint for other departments and agencies facing similar knowledge‑management challenges.