AI & People in the Workplace: Challenges and Balancing Solutions

Text and comment by Raman Devanathan, EMEA General Manager, Autom8 Consulting Ltd.

Automation is often framed as humans vs. machines. Even before the ongoing pandemic, the common narrative around cognitive technologies, and more importantly, Robotics Process Automation (RPA) is that these technologies are job-killers and will make humans obsolete in the workplace.

As the age of COVID-19 continues and customer interactions become increasingly digital, rather than feed into this dramatizations, embracing the many benefits of AI and RPA can actually empower employees to be more efficient, can help people grow in their careers and actually create jobs, rather than eliminate them.

Over the years to come, and as remote work continues to grow, RPA is expected to fully automate backend and repetitive customer-facing activities. However, to truly deliver the best customer experience companies will need to balance the use of RPA with human interactions throughout the customer interaction process. Humans will continue to be the front lines of these interactions and serve as the face of a brand whilst BOTs and RPA will act as assisting agents.

The key challenge for businesses and industry leaders is to ”Balance Automation With a Human Touch”

Digitalization of work processes requires adaptability and acceptance from the workforce. What is your experience with teams undergoing such transformation processes and how do you prepare them for the changes in the work environment?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can be amongst the most difficult change to accept, as its main benefit often publicized was reduction of costs, often synonym of reduction of the workforce. This myth can be addressed by appropriate communication early on in the implementation project.

Some of the good practices we use in such implementation is;

Do not impose robots, but let the teams propose their use. Involving the different process experts early on in the implementation of robotics will often lead into automations that will be significantly helpful for the teams and will drive the acceptance of these new “digital assistants”.

Show the staff that Robots are there to help the business perform better. Most employees would prefer to support their customers efficiently, rather than go into systems and manage administrative tasks. Robots are available to perform those tedious tasks, freeing more time for employees to use the skillsets and specialization they possess.

The importance of human contact, communication, and empathy can easily fall second in the digital age of efficient optimization technologies. How do you create balance in the teams you work with?

Name your Robots. A team of digital workers, with a name and a face drives a faster acceptance amongst the workforce: they usually relate to them as any other virtual worker in the company.

Report the successes every automation helps achieving. Yes, robots will help decrease costs on specific processes, but if an organization can now respond to their customers’ tickets in a day instead of 3, staff do not need to work overtime to catch up with the workload and measure increased customer satisfaction,

Such actions will help emphasize it’s not a Robot’s success or Staff’s success but it’s the success of the Operation Team, supported by RPA.

Are there examples from your practices of roles completely digitalized and executed by an application, AI, or a robot?

To fully digitalize a role, we will first need to ensure that the tasks performed in that role are repetitive, and with almost no process deviation. Some examples could be Service Desk activities, where a team member would create tickets based on contacts received by email, or chat, or even phone.

The newest technologies could assist in creating these tickets, with the relevant level of information and assign it to the correct resolution team. On occasions, it may even involve assigning some work to other robots.

Is the control still in the hands of the people?

People are the key success of any automation strategy.

The strength of RPA is to empower Business teams to automate their activities, with the support of their IT organization. Additional tools such as AI or Chatbots come as complementing technologies, to support more complex processes.

In many places, robots become the equivalent of team members, where team managers will follow up on the amount of work delivered. As a robot will be taught how to perform different tasks to support the team, the manager may also assign specific tasks depending on their own priorities. And the manager may also decide to stop the robot at any time if the business requires it.

Autom8 Consulting is one of the leading Intelligent and Robotic Process Automation service providers with offices in Bulgaria, UK & India

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is software which uses the notion of digital workers, to perform repetitive administrative tasks or processes which would otherwise be completed by humans.

The typical benefits of RPA include reduced cost, increased speed, accuracy, improved quality, better scalability of production, and security, especially for sensitive data and financial services.