Meet Your New Intern: The Rise of AI-Powered Digital Workers
Discover how AI-powered assistants can alleviate mundane tasks, retain employees, and drive organizational success.
Brian Weiss, SVP and field CTO at Hyperscience, explains why integrating digital workers presents an opportunity for organizations to streamline operations, boost efficiency, and show appreciation for their workforce.
Despite fearful headlines of AI replacing human workers, people want AI in the workplace. This is especially true today, as employees experience high levels of burnout and low job satisfaction, feeling under-appreciated and overworked.
According to the US Census Bureau, only 3.8% of businesses have adopted the technology. In July 2023, an Amdocs survey found that 66% of full-time workers wish employers offered AI solutions, citing their impact on productivity and efficiency. However, this growing disconnect between employer and employee can be rectified if we focus on AI-driven solutions.
What Are Digital Workers?
Enter digital workers. An AI-powered assistant, these “workers” act more like interns by automating mundane tasks, from transcribing calls to manual keying, data analysis, and everything in between – except grabbing a cup of coffee. These assistants can equip the workforce with the technology needed to streamline business processes, satisfying workers’ desire for the promise of AI-driven automation while yielding a high return on investment through accelerated and efficient operations.
With Employee Appreciation Day around the corner, organizations can show their gratitude to employees by simplifying their jobs with the gift of a digital worker to manage mundane tasks and repetitive workloads, leading to a better work-life balance and a satisfied workforce.
Introducing Your New Coworker
Integrating digital workers into existing operations may seem daunting, but these hesitations should quickly disappear when examining the return on investment. This is why leaders need to choose carefully when weighing out their options; finding a turnkey solution that provides enterprises with a single approach to eliminating mundane manual tasks will simplify this introduction into the workforce and tech stack. Investing in turnkey solutions, like digital workers, is a strong way to showcase appreciation for your employees, as it provides them with a ready-to-use tool that lightens their workloads.
Introducing these tools starts by defining the specific roles and tasks that digital workers can now be trained to complete. One obvious place to start is the repetitive manual back-office tasks that require manual data-keying to translate human information into machine-readable form. Inventory the choke points to automation and harvest all the data types that create the problem.
Digital workers can now be taught to understand this information and properly execute the task. This process is similar to a new hire ramp period but without the risk of attrition. Indeed reports, especially in a world where it can cost anywhere between $4,000 to $20,000 to hire a new employee – excluding salary and benefits – a digital worker’s “new hire period” is substantially more lucrative at the end of the day. Once these digital workers end their “new hire period,” these solutions can be deployed into the workforce at scale.
Building a Digital Worker for Your Organization
Like any intern or new hire, your digital worker won’t be a star employee but requires training and supervision. This may seem counterintuitive to demonstrating ROI. Once these models meet their goals, individuals can fully automate tasks and realize the full benefits of AI-powered digital workers. And unlike interns, which organizations cycle through often, digital workers don’t leave a business at the end of the summer but instead grow to become an integral part of cutting down on the mundane work. But to fully achieve its goals, the models must understand your business lingo, workflows, and guardrails.
Digital workers may contain the building blocks to complete tasks, for example, sorting through large amounts of data, analyzing customer sentiment, and integrating this intelligence into downstream systems and applications.
However, each organization handles these processes in a way that is unique to their enterprise. This requires training digital workers to understand and activate operations specific to a business, taking those simple skills like data management and fine-tuning them for specific industries like insurance.
As employees provide their digital workers with direct feedback and perform continual quality assurance, the data the machine receives will become more digestible, leading to more human-friendly outputs. Like closing a language barrier, employees must learn to communicate and provide their digital workers with the right information to produce desired results. Once this is done, employees gain time back in their day and can offload repetitive, simple tasks to their digital workers, allowing them to focus on the work that matters most to them, driving job satisfaction.
See More: 3 Ways AI Is Changing the Future of Work
Equipping Your Workforce With the Right Skills
There’s bound to be a learning curve when introducing any new technical solution to your workforce. However, with generative AI specifically, there seems to be a large misunderstanding that to interact with the technology, you must be a technical expert. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and with simple training, your workforce can successfully interact with digital workers, making it the perfect token of appreciation for your workforce.
As the popular saying goes, the ones who will have their jobs replaced by technology will be replaced by individuals who know how to use AI rather than the technology itself. In this vein, interacting with a digital worker is similar to interacting with the internet. Not everyone needs to understand how the internet and computers work, but everyone must understand how to access and interact with the Internet for a successful career. In the same way that learning how to use the internet revolutionized work and made simple tasks easier, learning to interact with digital workers will transform how work is completed today.
Leaders must ensure their workforce knows how to prompt digital workers correctly to get accurate outputs and check for quality assurance to leverage a digital worker. Understanding how to communicate efficiently with technology is key to improving operations, as without these skills, employees only waste more time trying to determine the validity of a response.
More importantly, organizations must provide responsible stewardship of their customers’ data and ethical AI training for employees, protecting all parties involved from cyber attacks and legal risks. Generative AI holds a plethora of cautionary tales, and before widespread adoption occurs, all employees must have a strong grasp of ethical procedures and risks.
The Workforce of Tomorrow is Digital
The previous year may have been the year of efficiency; 2024 is about implementation. It’s time for organizations to go beyond lip service by providing generative AI-powered solutions for their employees, adopting and integrating digital workers into the enterprise.
In a competitive labor market, the best organizations will be the ones who provide real productivity tools, giving employees the gift of time back in their days. Only once this is done can organizations enter an age of innovation and free their employees up to focus on the work that matters.
How can AI-driven digital workers transform your workplace? Let us know on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
Image Source: Shutterstcok
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