Technology is the biggest driver of change in the workplace. It can impact team efficiency, customer experience and employee productivity. As customers demand improved service, organizations are turning to their IT teams for solutions that facilitate better decision making by employees and increased customer retention.
Nowadays, customers and employees are used to working with digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa in their personal lives. They turn to them for entertainment, ordering products, scheduling appointments and more. Digital assistants have become part of their daily lives. This is making them wonder how digital assistants can now impact their work lives. Can digital assistants transform how they work and make them more efficient?
The next step in the journey of human-bot collaboration
The rapid rise of automation over the last few years is based on the principle of human bot collaboration. RPA automates repetitive and rule-based tasks to reduce errors. This has led to the RPA market growing by 62.9% in 2019, making it the fastest growing enterprise software segment. Now, with COVID-19 physical distancing protocols and remote working in the mix, there is an opportunity to integrate virtual digital assistants at the workplace to improve business continuity and resilience.
Now is the time to ask – if every employee had a personal digital assistant to automate routine tasks, what business impact could it have? Successful implementations of intelligent virtual assistants are being seen, but they work within specific business apps to deliver personalized notifications. What’s needed is a more intelligent AI-based digital assistant that prompts best actions by keeping human workers in the loop, handles a large volume of requests, and accesses all business apps on behalf of human workers. If integrated effectively, this digital assistant can improve efficiency, accuracy and speed.
Give every employee the power to automate
As RPA becomes more prevalent, the long-term goal is the democratization of automation. Digital assistants have the capacity to achieve this by enabling humans to work alongside bots seamlessly from any device, and on premises or in the cloud. Employees can witness the true potential and threat of automation firsthand, and they can also outsource repetitive and non-productive tasks.
This will ease the burden on human employees as digital assistants can source, process and share relevant information faster. By connecting people and processes across the enterprise, digital assistants can boost productivity and lower operational costs. This is where Automation Anywhere comes into the picture. AARI (Automation Anywhere Robotic Interface) is the world’s first on-demand smart digital assistant that operates on the cloud-native RPA platform – Enterprise A2019 – that aims to democratize automation at the workplace.
The transformative impact of AARI
AARI enables any employee to participate in the automation of day-to-day business tasks. It uses a business-friendly user interfaces that replicate consumer-grade experiences of personal digital assistants. AARI helps to increase collaboration between teams, improve customer service and simplify everyday tasks. It works on-premise or hybrid cloud environments to give easy accessibility and portability at the workplace.
AARI is envisioned as the tool that can ‘automate automation’. Employees can set up bots to automate approvals and escalations, thus passing on the end benefit of faster resolution to the customer. By keeping human workers in the loop, bots can accomplish routine tasks and request for human intervention as and when needed. A key component of making such a digital assistant succeed is the ability to collaborate with colleagues, apps and bots in real-time to remove all physical limitations. Moreover, confidential data can also be made accessible only by bots to help protect against fraud and security risks. AARI can also be embedded in existing business applications for 360-degree customer views and it can be accessed over web, desktops, mobile or voice search.
When combined with Automation Anywhere’s Discovery Bot – an integrated process discovery solution for the auto-creation of bots – AARI creates the possibility of end-to-end process automation. Faster business outcomes and lower operating costs are few of the more obvious benefits, but enhanced employee experience in difficult times is an indirect benefit. AARI can make every employee (no matter where they live or work) infinitely more productive by working constantly in the background and personalizing itself to suit every individual.
Conclusion
Intelligent digital assistants are at the beginning of their journey. Their technology is still maturing, and new functionalities are being added. They are paving the way for a new era of personalized digital assistants that help with end-to-end automation and make every employee feel like a top-level executive. Automation Anywhere’s intention is to empower each employee with a virtual assistant like AARI, while giving enterprises an affordable way to improve productivity and build business resilience.
