Intelligent agents to improve the employee experience

Employee experience goes far beyond the way people interact with their work tools. But, given the time spent behind a screen every day, it’s obvious that this side is a major concern.

I already said how disappointed  I was by how employees were treated compared to employers in terms digital journey.

If you think that your employees engagement is key to success you should take a minute to think about how they feel when they see the difference between them and the customers considering their digital relationship with the company and the means allocated to both sides.

I would like to go further into the idea of employee experience regarding to the workstation. Here are some points I wanted to share with you.

Intelligent agent change how we consider experiences and interactions

Globally speaking, intelligent agents change the way we consider experiences ans interactions. They are capable of giving answers instead of providing links to information that can be used to fin the answer, proposing options ranked by level of confidence, understanding the user’s context. They can also interact with users to better understand them, providing an experience that is closer than interactions with humans than using a search engine.

As I already wrote, most of social and collaboration solutions are not used in a strictly productive way but rather as a replacement for deficient search tools. Colleagues are being mobilized no to get things done with them but to share information and insights to get one’s work done on one’s own while the information is often available. Available but not or poorly accessible. Intelligent agents understand what people need, not what they’re searching for, gather scattered information, understand the context. In short, they allow to get rid of all the search, discovery and assessment work to focus on decision ans action.

If social and collaboration solutions have a productive purpose and have all the required qualities to improve things in this field, we can regret that employee’s time and attention are being more used to find an existing information that to get thing done.

The potential exists and I can’t imagine that intelligent agent’s won’t be embedded in intranets in a near future, most of all in digital workplaces. The future of the the workplace will involve intermediation and facilitation approaches that won’t be done by humans but by machines, humans keeping their time for tasks where their added-value is unmatched.

Regarding to experience, employees are orphan children of the enterprise

Employees are the orphan children of the enterprise. I already stated this above but I want to go further and show you an instructive video that backs my words. First because it shows an outstanding  experience of interacting with an intelligent agent on a e-commerce site. Second because it is an e)commerce site. Once you’ve watched it I suggest you ask yourselves two questions :

1°) What would be the value of something similar on an intranet in terms of employee experience ?

2°) How many years will it take until the time when this kind of approach will become mainstream on e-commerce sites and the time when it will land on the intranet, the digital workplace ? 10 years ? Of course it will require that the possibility of such things come to the right people’s ears, that they dare doing it…and the needed means are allocated to them.

Please take a minute to watch.

It’s not science fiction. It’s actually working.

Relevant answers, spoken interactions instead of using a search tool…everything’s in.

Taking with tools instead of talking to tools

The people who’ve been telling you for years that the digital and social enterprise will be powered by conversations were right. But, now, we must acknowledge that conversations don’t only happen between two humans. They can happen between humans and machines, even between two machines.

Tomorrow we’ll talk to our productivity tools, our search engine and that will dramatically improve things. Moreover, rather than saying “talk to”, what suggest a prescriptive and one-way interaction,  I’d rather say “talk with”, what suggests a promising collaboration between people and machines. For those who haven’t kept up with the matter since the time of “Deep Blue“, please note that neither the most cleaver human nor the best machine are as performing as an average human who optimizes the way he collaborates with an average machine. The future of collaboration is human to machine collaboration.

This video should convince you.

Bottom ligne : the way a good employee experience translates in the digital workplace is not a matter of nice interface only. It’s also a matter of productive interactions.

I have a bonus gift to end this post. If you’re wondering how smart agents and machines can improve your employee experience in the context of their work by making their work easier, helping them to make better decision, get rid of complicated and time-consuming tasks to help them focus on their mission, on what they like to do, on what’s rewarding…this video of the newly-launched Watson Discovery Advisor” should stimulate your creativity.


Crédit Image : Intelligent Assistant via Shutterstock

Bertrand DUPERRIN
Bertrand DUPERRINhttps://www.duperrin.com/english
Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
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