Artificial Intelligence In The Workplace - 2021 And Beyond
Organizations are modernizing their workplace to meet the needs of the changing workforce demographics and the other macro trends in the world. Every organization has felt the impact of COVID-19, regardless of its location or size. This has accelerated the need for organizations to be more digital and adopt emerging technologies faster.
Amidst reduced social connect and co-location, enterprises are focusing on collaboration at scale while keeping employee experience and productivity intact– be it a team meeting or a town hall, it is necessary to address all events with the same seamlessness from an experience and effectiveness perspective. Finding the right information while working remotely also became critical. Organizations are scrambling to adapt to rapid policy changes - hiring remote workers, retention, engagement, upskilling and reskilling employees. Mental health and work-life balance of employees also have taken precedence.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been steadily making its way into workplaces and is pushing boundaries across industries amid a fundamental change in thinking. AI has come a long way in augmenting human potential and helping enterprises globally to adapt to new ways of working. An effective AI implementation can handle repetitive tasks while freeing up employees to focus on more creative work and solving complex problems.
Shift in Employee Experience & Productivity
The pandemic will accelerate the use of AI & bots by redefining the scope and depth of self-service. Be it raising tickets on behalf of users in systems such as ServiceNow, Jira etc. or automatically resolving issues for them, bots can help without the need for human intervention. Today, workplace bots can help employees in adoption of channels like SharePoint, Teams and Cortana in multiple languages by synergizing silos. AI-based search improves employee productivity by providing a single, unified, and consistent search experience with the most relevant content results that amplify the definition of search in the remote workplace.
Facelift in HR
AI in workplace can help HR professionals perform better by keeping employees informed about announcements and polices, encouraging healthy habits and mental wellness. Workplace analytics data can display collaboration patterns, root out process inefficiencies, optimize process, and improve manager team engagement and productivity caused by the blurring lines between work and personal space.
AI can be used to empower HR teams to understand the emotional score of an interaction with meaningful next-best recommendations that help assist employees better.
In the new normal of work, AI can bring in efficiency and safety in the system with highly responsive processes such as automatic space allocation for people returning to office considering various factors including social distancing, people in a team, number of people expected in the office etc. By integrating non-intrusive safety audit models in the workplace like Computer Vision and camera-based AI services, organizations can ensure proper protection and social distancing.
Up-skilling Talent
As companies adopt newer technologies, training & adoption bots help in upskilling resources across business needs with the help of FAQs, personalized tips, and trainings. Training bots can help in adoption through multiple channels and languages that enable content authors to reach a global audience. Training bots additionally aid and augment employees with highly personalized content based on their experience, with persona-driven learning pace, accommodating aspirations, actions, and recommendations.
Business Operations & Growth
Artificial Intelligence embedded in business applications helps in learning and improving processes and the overall output of the systems. AI-powered applications are changing the workplace for frontline workers in multiple ways from creating the most efficient routes for fleets, helping with palletized cargo picking, sorting, shelving, moving, and packing in warehouses to ensure workers maintain social-distancing. Computer vision is making it possible to conduct visual quality checks and ensure workplace safety.
Streamlining IT Operations
With AI, IT organizations can now manage the workplace better even during these times of increased ticket volumes and reduced staff. Conversational Bots can help ease the load on the support staff by answering user queries and even resolving common issues. IT operations are getting more efficient with a paradigm shift from apps to context-aware conversations. These will help companies move from reactive to predictive and proactive help-desk approach and automate responses.
How will AI change the Workplace?
At Infosys, we are synergizing all the elements of innovation and cloud based transformation to a central theme called Cobalt. Modernizing workspace is about business-to-employee experiences powered by cloud enriched by intelligence and AI services.
Organizations today expect their workplace applications to help them maximize productivity through AI. The adoption of AI in workplaces will accelerate throughout 2021 and further enable employees to focus on strategic areas that provide better value and work satisfaction.
