Despite commercials suggesting that smart devices like Alexa have taken over jobs, Accenture estimates that AI combined with investment in human and machine collaboration could actually increase employment by 10% between 2018 and 2022, while also boosting efficiency of individual employees.
As artificial intelligence continues to transform the ways in which we manage people, processes and data, as well as think about work and perform tasks, what does the future workplace look like?
Benefits of AI in the Workplace
In a recent Gartner survey, 66% of respondents said they were investing in AI to automate repetitive or manual tasks, and 66% said they were looking to improve the customer experience.
How can that help?
Many people evaluate AI solutions because they’re doing manual data entry at several steps. First, they’re manually indexing a document in order to route it to the right team downstream who reads and extracts the data. In some cases, there’s a third or fourth downstream team doing further validation and quality assurance.
Automation adds immediate value at several places in this journey, and an Intelligent Document Processing [IDP] solution can automate a majority of manual entry and free up capacity in the process.
With the additional hours made available through automation, employees can streamline autonomous tasks and focus on utilizing core skills and knowledge at work, leading to increased employee satisfaction. In a poll conducted by CIO Dive, workers said they use about 38% of their knowledge at work and wished they had the time and bandwidth to use more.
Does this mean humans will be able to kick their feet up and relax while the robots do their jobs? Probably not.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, no work task they measured was performed entirely by machines or algorithms without human intervention. They found that 71% of total task hours were performed by humans and only 29% percent were performed by machines. What’s more, research done by Harvard Business Review shows that of companies who have begun implementing AI strategies at their companies, those who prioritize human-machine collaboration are seeing the most success.
Machines work best with humans supporting and guiding their work. However, transitioning to the workplace of the future won’t happen without business leaders prioritizing the relationship between humans and machines and orchestrating how they will collaborate and adapt to AI.
Read more about this and other interesting topics in our Enterprise Automation Blog.
