Canon Inc. has introduced Smart Support Chat, an AI-based support system designed to streamline maintenance operations for office multifunction devices.
The system has already been introduced in parts of Europe, Asia, and Oceania, with plans to expand it to the United States and Japan in 2026.
Frontline Workers
In supporting call centre staff and on-site service engineers to achieve further productivity gains in the field, a support system is required that enables maintenance staff to perform their tasks more efficiently and with higher quality.
The Smart Support Chat addresses this need by serving as a work assist system that integrates service manuals, accumulated field know-how, and real-time device operating data to analyse user-reported issues, which are entered by maintenance and support staff on a PC or smartphone, and identify the likely cause of the problem and recommend appropriate corrective actions. By using this system, both call centre staff who receive inquiries from users and service engineers who subsequently visit customer sites can respond more quickly, thereby further reducing device downtime.
Help at Hand
The system generates high-quality, relevant responses to a wide range of issues, such as paper jams and print‑quality defects, that each require different types of specialised knowledge.
To make this possible, Canon developed a proprietary AI agent. By leveraging generative AI technology, the AI agent can directly understand user spoken descriptions, such as “The image does not look right”, without requiring them to be converted into technical jargon. The system then searches a vast database of more than 120,000 service manuals, case studies, and past service records accumulated by Canon over the years to generate its responses. Even when the necessary information appears unrelated to the issue at first glance, the system can associate the problem with the relevant technical terminology, retrieve the appropriate information from the database, and determine and present appropriate corrective actions.
This is made possible by the logic embedded by Canon’s development team, with experts deeply familiar with the company’s multifunction devices, which enables the system to analyse the data and guide it toward the correct solution.
Remote Access and Real-time Information
The system operates on the Data-driven Service Foundation (DSF), Canon’s service platform that collects operating data from printers, including multifunction devices, and provides services that enable more efficient maintenance and support operations. It even enables remote access to the operation panel of an active MFD, allowing technicians to perform operations remotely, as well as check real‑time status of parts and consumables.
Efficiency Gains
Through this system and the remote access function, Canon expects to reduce annual service‑engineer dispatches by approximately 5% in regions where Smart Support Chat is deployed, an estimate based on Canon’s analysis of 2024 service‑engineer dispatch records. Looking ahead to 2028, Canon aims to further reduce it to around 20%, supported by further improvements in device quality and an expanded dataset powering the system.
