In the era of generative AI, what was previously seen as a challenge for businesses can now be seized as opportunities. We are talking about a technology that has the potential to disrupt how enterprises operate like never before. Indeed, today, the adoption of generative AI may represent a first mover advantage... but tomorrow, it could represent competitive parity or even disadvantage for those who are slow to adapt.
On one side, there is an opportunity to revamp and modernize your brand image by removing friction from customer interactions. Indeed, this revolves around centralizing, simplifying, scaling and personalizing the customer experience through a virtual assistant powered by generative AI (which will be the subject of my next blog).
On the other side, there's always been a never-ending quest of increasing the overall business velocity and results. How to do it ? Scale horizontally by increasing your workforce, or vertically by empowering your current workforce with digital tools. However, even with the rise in automation and massive hiring efforts from organizations, it never quite seemed to be the answer.
Let me stop here and get you to reflect on the following: 8 hours of work is not the same as 8 hours at work. Did you know that an employee is only productive for about 3 hours during a work day (a study by Invitation Digital Limited) ? There are a multitudes of factors contributing to this, mainly including inefficient tools and business processes, along with the natural limits of human focus.
- Inefficient Tools and Business Processes The Asana Anatomy of Work Index 2021 report reveals that "American workers switch on average between 13 applications at least 30 times a day" - to find information or complete a task. To reciprocate this statistic, the same report states that 62% of the work day is lost to repetitive, mundane tasks. To put it simply, IT teams have developed task-specific productivity tools, but democratized centralized automation for end-to-end process remains a gap, forcing employees to spend more time on tasks than necessary.
- Natural Limits of Human Focus Our time and energy is limited, but business pace and volume of client demands keep increasing.
This calls for a modern solution that cannot only help workers be more productive, but also help offload some of the work they face everyday. And with that was born the concept of a virtual assistants with integration, automation and generative AI capabilities.
Imagine a digital helper to the flavour of your organization, able to help employees get value-added tasks done faster, and even able to act as an employee of its own to take on non-value added tasks. Hence, you would be freeing up some more time for your employees to tackle additional value-added tasks. It literally becomes a full-circle of productivity. Do more with less !
This is a very popular, mature, low-hanging fruit use case for organizations looking to implement generative AI within their ecosystem, with real significant tangible business outcomes. To give you a real example, one of our client has operations across North America, which made it hard to collaborate with experts across different timezones and languages. Additionally, they have their corporate knowledge bases scattered around different applications, which made it hard to self-serve and be productive in completing a task. This used to cause delays in processes and employees were dissatisfied with the current IT ecosystem. The solution to their problem ? IBM's virtual assistant, connected to their internal applications, such as ServiceNow, SAP and Sharepoint.
This enterprise is currently using this assistant to centralize their employees’ everyday tasks within a single platform across different channels (MS Teams and their Intranet). The IBM solution allows them to centralize their corporate knowledge base, which was once scattered across the 3 aforementioned applications, making the finding of information easier and faster through a summarized answer with generative AI - using a RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) pattern. Other than informational capabilities, it is also used for the transactional aspect of automating tasks, like simplifying and accelerating the creation of support ticket through Natural Language Understanding (pre-populating/contextualizing the conversation with information contained in SAP and ServiceNow profiles).
This resulted in workers being able to get immediate multilingual answers 24/7, offloading big volumes of requests to support agents and removing the need for a human to go through non-value added tasks. Every employee is now more motivated to work with a modern solution, can be more productive and 100% invested in mission-critical tasks.
Other than qualitative benefits, the measurable outcomes also spoke volume:
- 1.04 day to 30 seconds [99.97% improvement] to complete a task (ie. procurement).
- Reduction volume of calls to the "L2 support agents" department of 55%.
- Increased FTE productivity by 10 %.
As you can see, it is all about cutting cost, while generating faster and better results, for a real impact on an enterprise bottom line.
At the end of the day, no matter how many people work, or how much automations are put in place, if workers' productivity at its very core, with the tools at their disposal, isn't at its full potential, there is wasted capacity. Your employees are the customers of your internal applications and their expectations are often high when it comes to that (just like actual clients). Offer your team the resource they need, streamline their efforts and reclaim your day.
The time of change and modernization is now.
For more information on IBM’s Virtual Assistant or an inquiry on tailored use cases to your business needs, do not hesitate to reach out.