by Raghav Sriram, Global Head – Sales and Customer Success at Vuram.
The pandemic and its economic impact have disrupted people’s operations, leading to numerous challenges, including the Great Resignation wave and over hiring. In this environment, it is essential to extend job security to support highly knowledgeable human workers to manage work that machines cannot handle. Nurturing a supportive eco-system backed by the right technologies is one way to close the skill gaps and ensure job stability while ensuring that business operations are unaffected.
Introducing artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies at work is one way to close skill gaps and future-proof operations to improve productivity and work quality, which is crucial for job satisfaction. Automation at work can help employees save time, focus on other mission-critical tasks, and additional upskilling to adapt to the growing market requirements.
Besides, automation solutions free up valuable time employees can otherwise invest in learning and improving work quality. With the digital workforce working alongside humans, organizations must identify areas of improvement to enhance the roles of human workers.
Below are three significant ways AI and digital technologies can improve functions and enhance job security.
Reimagine roles for resilience
Embracing AI for automation can make the roles more practical and remove the burden off employees’ shoulders. For example, consider IT teams. According to a recent AppDynamics survey of 6000 participants, who were global IT leaders, automation has been identified as an essential go-to strategy. Another interesting finding from Tata Consultancy Services states that nearly 46% of IT teams of large corporations incorporate AI into their work portfolios. Humans can perform more efficiently when working with the digital workforce. With the support of software robots, people can find ways to improve their performance, free up time for upskilling, and carry out functions in a timebound manner.
AI and automation for IT are just the tip of the iceberg, and there are many more roles and use cases. Another interesting example would be in predicting customer sentiment. The new-age customers are expressing their opinions about brands and their experience with those brands on social media platforms and emails. How can an organization understand its sentiments and derive insights when there’s a considerable volume of such unstructured data? This is where AI is needed, combining the power of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. NLP transforms the natural human language to machine-readable formats, detects the meaning of the words, and ML identifies the patterns and finally helps detect the customer’s emotions and sentiments.
Enhanced job satisfaction
Contrary to “technology replaces humans”, technology is not an alternative to human employees. Identifying and implementing the right technologies gives a significant advantage for the people at work to perform at unimaginable levels. With the right technology, the organization benefits from resource optimization, reducing wastage, predicting potential risks, and limiting uncertainties.
The advantages of technology integration improve job security and confidence levels of employees, giving them more control over their roles. For instance, hyperautomation technologies have transformed banking, with backend activities benefitting from the highest accuracy, compliance, and speed-to-solution technologies. At the same time, the humans at work can focus on identifying focused and innovative solutions to address customer demands.
Decision-making functions can be enhanced with real-time data, and work can be streamlined by connecting various processes and departments to develop innovative solutions for the market.
One of the relevant examples could be AI-powered enterprise chatbots. In a global, remote/hybrid working environment, chatbots that support multiple languages can greatly boost employees.
Workforce flexibility
Adopting the right technology can address the age-old challenge of workforce flexibility. With the digital workforce, organizations can meet the flexible workforce requirements to handle market challenges without letting go of their people. During the pandemic, the digital workforce managed operations to support front-line workers while most employees worked remotely, ensuring social distancing crucial to saving lives.
With minimal investments compared to infrastructural expansion, production and operational capabilities could be met with automation solutions. With technologies working together under human and AI supervision, the workforce requirements could be expanded and reduced without impacting the people at work, ensuring higher levels of job security and positioning people to focus on qualitative roles that require them to leverage cognitive skills. In contrast, the digital workforce takes over repetitive and complex tasks. Workforce flexibility is also essential to promote learning, inclusion, and innovation culture, allowing the company to progress and address future challenges.
With diverse challenges impacting industries, organizations must focus on making roles impactful and effective to overcome the looming recession and its economic impact. Future-proofing roles will have a long-term effect on well-being and improve the happiness index at work, shaping a healthy and positive work culture and a resilient working environment vital to navigate potential challenges.
Raghav Sriram is the Global Head – Sales and Customer Success at Vuram. Raghav has over two decades of industry experience and is based in Sydney, Australia. He is well-versed in BPM, RPA, and low-code application development. At Vuram, Raghav and his team ensure that all the customers have the best experience possible.
