Bots Meet Humans: A 5-Step Program for Enterprises to Create a HuBot-Powered Workplace
The future workplace is undeniably digital, and enterprises are currently molding it by leveraging bots and embracing artificial intelligence (AI) and all things cognitive. The “Automation First” era has enabled some organizations to leapfrog into the future, pushing them to think and implement smarter business delivery models.
Intelligent automation is not only destined to impact the future workplace but is also a major catalyst for redefining the roles and responsibilities of employees. Bots form an integral part of the whole intelligent automation phenomenon, spearheading this digital transformation.
One of the most common examples of bots is software bots or robotic process automation (RPA) bots deployed to perform activities such as processing vendor and customer invoices and employee payroll. Customer service is another area that’s well populated with bots, particularly chatbots or conversational bots, that effortlessly handle typical customer queries and provide them with preliminary information.
These chatbots can also identify the context and the intent of the interaction and take appropriate actions, thereby reducing the number of tickets and inbound calls to a contact center. This frees up customer service representatives to focus on critical customer issues that require strategic/logical decision-making or emotional intelligence, thereby allowing them to put their energies in serving premium customers where a human touch is needed and appreciated.
Moving forward, we expect bots to work not just alongside human staffers, but with them. We call these coexisting, co-working bots HuBots or CoBots (short for collaborative robots).
What Are HuBots?
HuBots in simple layman terms refer to humans and bots that work in tandem in a workplace to deliver accelerated and accurate business outcomes. The bots, like their human counterparts, come in many shapes and sizes: humanoid bot, virtual assistants /chatbots, RPA bots, industrial bots, and so on. Bots play a vital role by performing mundane, repetitive, transactional, and rule-based tasks with accuracy. Their sole objective is to allow human counterparts to perform more cognitive, strategic, and skill-based roles to attain better business goals and enhanced customer satisfaction.
Bots can be purely operational, i.e., those that perform a specific (or an entire) part of a business function. Or, they could be role-based bots that perform an entire role/job description of a human. For example, a conversational HR bot can have conversations on different topics with the end user (“Where can I find my payslips?” or “How can I reopen my timesheet?”), use cognitive skills and perform multiple functions under the HR’s job description, complementing or extending the role of an actual HR person. An operational HR bot could be a scheduling bot that can schedule interviews based on parameters set by HR, such as minimum work experience, academic qualifications, a specific skill set, availability of interview panel, and timeslots for interviews. Unlike operational bots that require the human in the loop, role-based bots altogether remove the need for employee intervention and can act as virtual subordinates/teams.
HuBots or CoBots are very much prevalent in the manufacturing industry, taking on a diverse range of tasks and applications. CoBots, for example, work in automotive companies’ production lines right alongside employees in the welding department. Previously, workers had to load the individual chassis separately before robots could undertake any welding tasks. Now, the CoBots can work on the same chassis simultaneously, resulting in drastically reduced production time. Another example is where CoBots assemble a car alongside a human who focuses on either quality or other detail work that can’t be performed by a machine.
Creating Synergy Between Humans and Bots
In IT-centric environments, many enterprises struggle to implement the HuBot model. This is primarily due to fragmented processes, inability to change the employee mindset, lesser or no buy in from the top management, poor coordination between IT and business, and an overall myopic view concerning intelligent automation. So, how do enterprises incorporate HuBots into the workplace to achieve efficient and accurate outcomes that otherwise wouldn’t be possible by either humans alone or bots alone?
Step 1 – Creating awareness
Organizations need to assure their employees that bots are not here to supplant them but instead to enable them to transition toward better and strategic roles. Giving employees the confidence that bots are a logical extension to their work, and not an overhead or threat, will help engage employees in the process of designing, integrating, implementing intelligent automation in their respective functions.
Step 2 – Understanding the ROI
Solutions should be designed keeping a specific use case in mind with a clear demarcation of the role/job between bots and humans. In the insurance sector, for example, actuaries help insurance companies determine the risk for life insurance, property, liability, and other kinds of insurance, making sure that the insurance companies are financially able to pay claims.
Actuary bots could work alongside actuaries to help them analyze statistical data like mortality, accident, sickness, disability, and enable the actuary to accurately forecast risk and liability for the payment of future benefits. Conversational bots can support customer awareness and education efforts, comparing policies, and even suggesting an optimal policy for insurers.
The next step of meeting with the customer can then be taken over by human agents. This would help insurance organizations reap benefits in many areas, such as better customer experience, increased productivity, razor-sharp accuracy, and enhanced efficiency.
To reap the maximum ROI, organizations need to tackle the fragmented processes challenge by looking at business problems or methods from a use-case and a business ROI perspective rather than merely a set of tasks.
Learn More: Relieving Back Office Pain – How AI Is Shaping the Workplace of the Future
Step 3 – Leveraging the IT-business partnership
Enterprises are the primary force behind the ideation of CoBots. Still, it’s the individual employee and the business units themselves that drive the design and ensure their success, with support from internal and external IT experts. An organization’s business units always have a pulse on the market in terms of how their customers are operating manually and digitally. They need the required technical prowess, the feasibility in terms of the readiness, underlying platforms, systems, and umpteen other parameters. IT helps the business evaluate, validate, and implement the solution. The IT-business unit relationship needs to be a hand-in-glove initiative where business becomes the demand-generation engine for bot creation, and IT evaluates and implements.
Step 4 – Governing the digital enterprise
Designing a risk and governance framework that suits the intelligent automation will alleviate security and compliance concerns. Proactively training employees on the usage of bots, tools, and platforms, clear segregation of bot duties, and access and identity management is crucial. This will help avoid misuse of privileges and confidential data.
Well-designed bots ensure compliance with regulations and security. Take the example of fraud detection or money laundering risks that could cause banks to incur huge losses and reputational damage.
Chatbots can be programmed to detect these risks and compliance failures early on (e.g., during customer onboarding) and get even wiser and smarter at risk and compliance management with time. Highly regulated industries in the healthcare field are making their bots HIPAA compliant to ensure stricter compliance in areas where patients’ personal information is involved.
Learn More: Robot Colleagues and the Workforce of the Future
Step 5 – Coexisting and evolving together
Just as bots help humans, it’s also important to understand that humans are equally assisting bots to improve their digital intellect. More cognition is being built into these bots with every passing day. They’re evolving, learning from historical data and unique scenarios, improving themselves with time. However, as these bots handle more complex tasks that involve decision-making and strategizing, they’ll still need that “human touch” to make sense of what they do and how they handle exceptions. The HuBot relationship, by definition, needs to be a symbiotic one – the more they interact with one another, the more they’ll learn from each other and become the cornerstone of what is becoming a digital society across enterprises.
For this dynamic duo to work, enterprises should envision a business delivery model that encompasses bot-human work teams where the combined efforts contribute more than each one could separately. By envisioning multiple ways of bonding humans plus bots to work cohesively using different cognitive levers, the surefire way of strengthening this bond is by involving employees in this whole process.
A solid bot pedagogy, a HuBot community that acts as a common forum for employees to share their bot experiences, and a strong rewards and recognition program are some of the ways to imbibe a HuBot culture in the organization. Only when enterprises embrace this collaborative way of working with open arms, will their operations and customer experiences transform dramatically.
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