How AI will bring an Employee eXperience shift in Enterprises?
AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, … all have been buzzword for the past 2 years claiming a lot of promises. But really, it is only the early onset.
Recently there was multiples breakthroughs in image recognition and in Natural Language Understand. NLU is one of the main building block to move toward a seamless voice or text interaction with machines. Simply put, when given a sentence, NLU will understand subjects, actions, locations, times, … It will make sense of the words’ order because “I want a book about ship” has not the same intend at all as “I want to ship a book” even if 5 out of 6 words are the same.
Now that the NLU is quite capable of understanding text and context, it is easy to bring another block on it to do Speech to Text and start talking to Bots / Virtual Enterprise Assistants. Text based requests might be better suited for an enterprise environment from a privacy standpoint and will not be impaired by accents.
In enterprises, there are many simple repetitive tasks that are done through mobile and web apps that require many clicks to get an answer. For example, when you need to find the email or phone number of a coworker, you probably
1. have to go on the Enterprise directory via the Enterprise Intranet or an Enterprise Mobile App,
2. Type the first name, last name,
3. Click search and get a card with the information.
Why not simply ask in Lync or Slack “What is Pete Mitchell’s cell phone number” and let a Bot / Virtual Enterprise Assistant answers directly with the phone number?
And why not asking “What meeting room on my floor is available now for 2 hours?” rather than browsing all the meeting rooms’ agenda?
The cornerstone and one of the major roadblock here is of course the API calls needed from the Bots / Virtual Enterprise Assistants to connect with the enterprise database, software and services to serve relevant answers.
Those Bots / Virtual Enterprise Assistants are already embedded in our phones, computers and gadgets with Watson, Siri, M, Google Assistant, Cortana, Alexa and a lot more. They are already letting consumers send texts, set reminders, book an Uber, and a lot more. In the enterprise, Slack is already offering multiple bot add-ons in its apps directory and there is no reason for Microsoft not to announce something similar with a tighter integration between their services. Especially since Microsoft owned so much of the core enterprise backbone with Active Directory, Azure, Exchange, Office, Lync, …
A lot of AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, … will be embedded in most, if not all, enterprise processes. It will take time, it will be iterative, but it will definitely improve productivity and operations. And It will be a UX or Employee eXperience shift.
