How AI makes the digital workplace smarter, stronger and more secure

Drop ‘AI’ and ‘workplace’ in one sentence, and you’re bound to get mixed reactions. Are intelligent computers going to make certain jobs obsolete? Undoubtedly – they already have. Instead, a vast range of new functions and job descriptions emerges. The future sees human and machine working together to achieve new levels of efficiency, and it’s already happening today.

According to Gartner, 30% of the jobs that exist today will disappear by 2025. The new dynamics between AI and human workers, however, will result in a 50% increase in jobs – most of which don’t even exist today. Just think about websites: technological progress has resulted in greater expectations in terms of content and interactivity, which means new skills have to be learned almost constantly.

Today, the main function of AI in the workplace is to make life easier for employees. This happens in four main fields, which not coincidentally constitutes an intersection of all the tasks workers are confronted with on a day-to-day basis:

• Communication
• Support
• Collaboration
• Decision-making

Communication

In communication, the role of AI is to make the information presented to the employee as relevant as possible for them by taking their identity, function, location, task, etc. into account. For example, if an employee sends out a lot of emails about chatbots, the AI system can use this as a driver to push news about this topic.

Virtual assistants in the form of chatbots are another communication-based application of AI. They can inform an employee about practicalities based on timing (specific time of day) and location (specific company site). For example: the elevator is broken, there are 10 minutes left to order lunch, etc.

Support

AI offers a number of opportunities to help employees with simple or repetitive administrative tasks. One example is automatically informing HR and people with whom you have appointments in case of illness, as well as automatically reminding you to hand in your doctor’s note.

Collaboration

To improve collaboration on the work floor, AI can offer real-time translation. In this way, it eliminates language barriers in international companies. Sentiment analysis is gaining traction, too: here, the effect of your words on your conversation partner becomes clearer, resulting in more empathic and thus more efficient conversations.

Decision-making

By providing employees with relevant data, AI helps workers make more informed decisions, boosting their efficiency and effectiveness in all work settings. In these ways, AI takes ‘unproductive’ hours from employees, resulting in higher efficiency.

But AI can play an important role in improving data security as well. Office 365, for example, is equipped with Threat Analysis Protection: an intelligent feature that recognizes any document that is opened and proactively protects your devices. In the same way, incoming emails are scanned for malevolent software.

These kinds of security checks are multi-device and multi-location, as they are linked to the files themselves and not the device. In this way, even when a document is forwarded to other parties, the same reading and writing rights will apply.

The context of GDPR has raised awareness of data compliance. For example, AI can scan documents for client data, invoices, and confidential information. Subsequently, it can attach specific policies to these files, and effectively automate compliance. Here, intelligent systems make life easier for employees so they can focus on their core tasks.

Get inspired by the opportunities of AI in the workplace: reach out to our experts for more information.