16 Sep
How To Revolutionize Your Digital Workplace With Everyday AI
The pandemic crisis has demystified a long-drawn conclusion of work from office holding an edge over remote work. Organizations globally are prioritizing their investments in digital workplace transformation mapping to the work from home or hybrid work environment. Enterprises will need to focus on flexibility and agility in response to adapt to a fast-changing situation.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, while there was a digital-first slogan everywhere, transformation lacked the front seat counting on the priority investments then. Several legacy applications and processes took a hit during the pandemic lockdown due to a lack of scalability. Additionally, with an increase in employees working from home, communication and engagement became an additional challenge.
Slowly organizations looked at AI as a game-changer. Automation and AI are at the forefront of managing these hurdles efficiently in addition to enhancing stakeholder experiences.
AI and ML are helping enterprises globally to adapt to new ways of working and scaling businesses, especially in today’s crisis. In the COVID-19 era, organizations that successfully combine human and machine capabilities have not only survived the tide but were able to tweak the tide to an opportunity.
Infusing AI in transforming legacy applications has given a competitive advantage. According to Forbes columnist Louis Columbus, 63 percent of enterprise leaders say they have adopted AI technology to catch up with rivals. Having a plan to adopt AI isn’t just about working better internally; but also not being left behind.
Artificial intelligence in the digital workplace
AI covers a broad and continually evolving range of technologies in the modern digital workplace. Everyday AI brings substantial importance to the organization, transforming the way organizations communicate, collaborate, search, and share information in the digital workplace.
“Over the next decade, AI will offer employees unprecedented information awareness and insight, freedom from low-value-additional activities, and the ability to use complex technologies,” says Bern Elliot, Distinguished VP Analyst, Gartner.
The future of AI involves evolved cognitive systems, advanced algorithms, and anomaly detections. Let us explore some areas for consideration in an AI-infused digital workplace.
AI-Powered Personalization
Employees spending a lot of productive hours in finding relevant information on time due to information overload is an age-old hassle awaiting automation. Personalized content delivery is the key to the intranet adoption in the organization. Modern intranet equipped with AI recommends content based on a user profile, interactions, teams, etc. With AI tapping into the legacy applications, employees get tailored and relevant information quickly, based on their activities, interests, and locations, which not only saves time and effort but also leaves more productive time for skilled work.
As a Forrester report suggests, More than half (54%) of global information workers are interrupted from their work a few times or more per month to spend time looking for or trying to get access to information, insights, and answers. All the information is generally available within the organization but is not easily accessible or searchable at the right time.
A possible and positive side effect of AI-powered personalization is adoption and enhanced employee engagement. Increased engagement rates are a delight to every HR personnel in this crisis.
Personalization is the key, making employees more receptive to intranet adoption and utilizing the information hosted on it. As expectations from the intranet evolve rapidly to address emerging needs, organizations are transforming from using the traditional intranet to leveraging AI, machine learning, and contextual processing. These changes have introduced elements of personalization in today’s digital workplace equipping employees with the right information at the right time.
Knowledge Mining
Employees spend a maximum of their time either looking through or creating unstructured information. A lot of information is just locked away in thousands of files, which is difficult to find and time-consuming as well. By the time, the information is identified and organized, it loses its value and is fit for only archiving.
Almost 80% of the data generated is unstructured, and much of it can only be interpreted manually by an expert. Knowledge mining techniques using a combination of AI services navigate content understanding over immense amounts of unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data that allows the organization to uncover insights, explore it, and find relevant information quickly. Auto-tagging and indexing make the documents discoverable but also enhances its searchability and accessibility.
Right now, when every knowledge worker is figuring out how best to stay in line with organizational wealth, there is no better time than now to start with AI in knowledge mining.
Cognitive Enterprise Search
Keeping remote employees both engaged and productive, however, will be particularly challenging for companies. Organizations that are still using the old keyword-based enterprise search engines of the past are now obsolete. Cognitive search is the new technological advancement in enterprise search that uses artificial intelligence (AI) technologies like NLP, ML to ingest, analyze, and organize digital content. Leveraging these technologies facilitate search results that are more relevant and contextual, eliminating the frustration and recreating near duplicates of files.
With AI algorithms and office graph kinds of technologies, the search mechanism is now well equipped in establishing the context of the search query or searcher’s intent. Accordingly, fetches search results, which are per user’s expectations.
Besides, AI-driven search solutions are a powerful way for enterprises to seamlessly integrate the knowledge from different platforms and make it readily available to their employees in a single user interface.
The single search feature eliminates the necessity of switching between numerous apps that eliminates time wasted on tasks like re-entering credentials multiple times. Moreover, unified data tools allow enterprises to streamline their business processes.
Read more: 9 Critical Capabilities Of a Modern Enterprise Search
Virtual Digital Assistants
In the current remote working scenario, where employees are managing personal activities like house chores, kids, and pets alongside their office duties, work timings of employees are beyond the typical 9 to 5 work hours. Therefore, the need for assistance round-the-clock to provide instant resolutions to employee support requests is much stronger.
With AI making inroads, regular support requests wait for an hour is quickly resolved by AI chatbots. The inherently complicated request, requiring human intelligence will quickly escalate to human agents owing to one of the great features of virtual assistants – the human handoff feature.
AI-powered chatbots equip employees with more personalized and relevant information through a conversational interface from anywhere at any time. And also update employees with the latest updates and news. These processes will improve employee productivity and streamline business operations in the new normal.
One of the key use cases of virtual agents in the new normal is for the HR department. They are using it to collect health information, create a regular employee touchpoint, distribute health and safety bulletins, and much more.
Conclusion
Looking at the realms of possibilities, it would not be an exaggeration to say that an AI-infused digital workplace can act as a catalyst to bring a fundamental shift in the traditional workplace environment. An AI-Powered Employee Experience Platform acts as the foundation of the digital workplace. It is a one-stop-shop to collaborate, communicate, and share information enabling organizations to boost intranet adoption, employee engagement, and productivity.
A digital workplace without an intranet as its foundation will end up being a collection of disconnected digital waypoints. But with an intranet anchoring the digital workplace, the organization will be laying the foundation for success.
Mesh 3.0 launched as the World’s Best AI powered Employee Experience Platform helps organizations in unlocking untapped knowledge, streamlining processes, and creates a seamless yet effective global network – providing a central hub for breaking down silos. Mesh modern intranet features enhance employee engagement, boosting internal communication and collaboration that catalyze a digital workplace environment.
Poonam Chug is AVP - SaaS Strategy & Business. She has worked in various areas, right from designing and executing sales & account management strategies to reengineering digital workplace solutions. With her determined focus on our mission and progressive approach, she has achieved customer delight in the space of AI, Knowledge Mining, Content & Collaboration, Virtual Assistants, RPA and more. Backed with a deep understanding of customer needs and technology, she leads the SaaS business unit with an upshot of maximizing revenue while ensuring customer satisfaction.
Poonam Chug