Remembering the human factor in AI -- Why businesses should focus on workflows, not just applications
An Office for National Statistics (ONS) report shows that one in three UK workers now believe AI could take their job. This concern has been intensified by narratives that overlook AI’s success in collaborating with humans. In reality, the most effective AI applications have been those that serve as assistants to employees, enhancing their role and maximizing their productivity, rather than replacing them.
Businesses undoubtedly understand the potential AI has to boost the productivity of employees, with more than three in every four organizations either using or exploring the use of AI. However, employers are equally unaware of the complexity of their employees’ workflows. A recent WalkMe report shows that enterprise leaders believe their business is using an average of 21 applications each week. The true number is 211, with more than 20 percent of those being AI applications.
Users can no longer simply learn every application on their own as they go. Employees often find that by the time they master one technology, it is already becoming obsolete. To truly boost employee productivity, businesses should get smart when leveraging AI. Integrating AI directly into the workflows of their employees should be a strategic imperative for businesses that want to avoid the counter-productivity of tool sprawl.
Productivity on the Ropes
The recent report by WalkMe also estimates the weekly enterprise loss due to low productivity to be nearly £1 million. Staggeringly, that is equivalent to the average annual salary of 28 employees. Quiet quitting, lack of training and poor management are all contributing factors to waning productivity in businesses. However, with COVID accelerating the adoption of hybrid and work-from-home models, the disparate nature of workforces has increased businesses’ reliance on technology to perform a multitude of functions.
Technology like AI can now help to maintain systems, patch vulnerabilities, and even inform and educate employees on how to do their jobs. But with innumerable tools available to businesses today, it can be hard to know where to begin. Gartner predicts global IT spending will increase to nearly £4 trillion by the end of 2024, a nearly 7 percent year-on-year rise. This illustrates the importance of businesses making fully informed investment decisions when upgrading their tech stack.
In response to the escalating technological battle with their competitors and tightening budgets, businesses may naturally turn to more immediate AI solutions to enhance the quality and quantity of their employees’ work. This might include applications that create better-written content, automate processes like customer communications, or even automatically manage calendars. With employees using more and more applications, it would be beneficial for employers to help them maximize the use of existing tools instead of letting AI become another example of application sprawl.
Optimizing Workflows
A task as simple as doing the laundry requires detergent, a washing machine and a power supply. Similarly, almost every work task will use multiple applications in a single workflow. However, each application has different functionality, much like Windows, macOS and Android operating systems using different icons, layouts and styles.
Businesses should now be looking to use AI as an aggregator, connecting to all software in an operating system to suggest the next best step in a task. For example, if a new business presentation contravenes company guidelines, an AI aggregator can scan the company’s best practice document and communicate what changes need to be made and which application would help the most. To achieve the best results, AI should understand the context of the end user. AI that uses contextual awareness knows where the user is in their workflow and can anticipate the needs of the individual, not just giving help for each application, but for the entire process.
When AI has context, it becomes more proactive, accessible and actionable. This helps to simplify and streamline a workflow by reducing the need for an employee to look elsewhere for information, breaking their workflow and concentration. This can also enable a much smoother journey between applications on their way to completing a task. Only when AI truly understands how humans work can it provide the sorts of timesaving, compliance, and quality improvements needed for businesses to maximize their ROI on AI investments.
It took 2.4 million years for our ancestors to control fire and use it for cooking, but only 66 years to progress from the first-ever powered flight to humans landing on the moon. The bell curve of AI advancement may be even steeper in its ability to help humans. But for businesses to make the most of its utility, they must invest in AI that understands the many applications and components of a task, and optimizes their employees’ ability to complete it. Organizations should embrace technology that understands the context and journey that its employees take so they can create unbroken workflows, and more productive workforces.
Ofir Hatsor is SVP Sales EMEA, WalkMe.