How AI will transform the Digital Workplace (and how it already is)

Talk of Artificial Intelligence – or AI – is everywhere. The rapid development of AI promises a future where bots will run routine tasks better and cheaper than humans. This, in turn, will transform what we currently call the digital workplace into one where people and machines are constantly connected, learning and improving.

First up, what is AI?

Artificial Intelligence is the concept of machines which “think like humans” — performing tasks like planning, reasoning, learning, and understanding natural language. AI uses machine learning, which broadly means technology which learns and improves over time, rather than being explicitly programmed to do a task.

AI – including machine learning and big data – will bring about profound changes to the way we work, acting as a virtual assistant performing routine tasks to make us more productive. This will change almost every job role, from receptionists to lawyers, and transform management, hierarchy and organisational structure.

AI in the future intelligent workplace

While some analysts foresee a future where robots make up the majority of the workforce, most believe it more likely we’ll augment humans resources with machines who can perform both routine and complex tasks faster and better than us. A study by Narrative Science found 80% of CEOs believe IA improves worker performance and creates jobs.

AI will make all of us more productive by taking the grunt work off our hands and performing complex, analytical tasks faster and more accurately. Intelligent systems will help us to  analyse information instantly and in-depth so that we can better measure, plan and predict.

AI gives us the ability to analyse and look for patterns in huge volumes of data. For example in HR this could identify high and low performers, as well as people who are looking to leave so they can be targeted with incentives to stay.

It will anticipate customer needs and enable us to tailor content and experiences at scale. This will help communicators to deliver content that’s highly relevant and in a format most likely to drive action based on previous behaviours. Think of it as mass personalisation.

In the intelligent workplace of the future every one of us can have a PA to pick up tasks that are repetitive and fiddly, from finding diary availability and booking meetings, to passively completing and charging timesheets for us based on our inboxes and diaries. We won’t need to send progress updates when the systems we work with can do it for us.

In the future digital workplace, real people will complete tasks for only as long as it takes for AI to learn and take over, allowing us to get on with high-value work.

While most AI projects look at how AI can make us work better, The University of New South Wales want to improve how we feel at work too. They’re developing prototype social robots that will monitor and enhance employee wellbeing and facilitate collaboration between colleagues.

AI in today’s intelligent workplace

But while this sounds like the stuff of science fiction, AI has quietly been integrated into many of the apps and experiences we use every day. Facebook’s recommended photo tags, for example, use image recognition, while Spotify’s Discover Weekly uses machine learning to make its recommendations uncannily good.

Consumers now expect the same intelligence from all their experiences – including those at work. So enterprise vendors have begun integrating AI into their products to make them smarter, faster and more personal.

Office 365 already makes use of AI and machine learning, for example to assist with image optimisation in PowerPoint, document classification, and making content accessible by auto-adding alt text and transcribing video.

It beefs up products across the O365 suite:

• To-Do (the app Microsoft built following their Wunderlist buyout) has an option to create a ‘to do’ list for you based on things you normally do, or tasks you used to do but haven’t for a while, learning from your previous activity.
• Cortana learns the distance between meeting rooms and how long the lift takes between floors so she can give a prompt to leave for your next meeting on time.
• MyAnalytics tells you how productive you are at different times of day, which meetings you’re most easily distracted in, who you contact most and when.  It can then use that to suggest improvements for better communication, work life balance, and so on.
• PowerBI has an ‘explain this’ feature – where it figures out what could have caused the data change.  AI being able to constantly do that, knowing your objectives, can help you plan resources or responses more effectively.

And here’s some examples from other products:

• Transcription is slow, expensive and boring. Descript allows you to view and edit audio as text, like a magic word processor.
• GenderEQ is a Machine Learning experiment applied to an everyday challenge – gender equality in the meeting room, using data insight to raise awareness of mansplaining.

Many of the tools we call AI are already commodity services which are invisible to the end user, and that trend looks set to continue. With AI now a common tool in the programmers’ armoury, over the coming years it will make its way into most enterprise software, making the digital workplace more intelligent, connected, delightful, personalised and occasionally just plain creepy.

The UK’s Chartered Institute of Public Relations has convened an #AIinPR panel to look at the impact of artificial intelligence on public relations and business. A group of practitioners with expertise in this emerging area (including me) are undertaking three projects this year, starting with a crowdsourcing exercise to identify the tools which are already making an impact on communications.

If you are a communications practitioner and you are using any smart tools that make your life easier,  please add your recommendations to our crowdsourcing project or use #AIinPR hashtag on Twitter.