How to battle coronavirus with the power of AI
Let’s face it: the coronavirus epidemic is damaging the global economy. And it’s bad. Like, really bad.
These are the facts:
- Severe restrictions to slow the spread of the coronavirus are taking a big toll on the global economy and it is only going to get worse before it gets better, experts say. For example, Italy is already in lockdown, and the U.S. has banned flights from Europe.
- The FTSE, Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nikkei have all seen huge falls since the outbreak began on 31 December. The Dow and the FTSE recently saw their biggest one day declines since 1987.
- Companies all over the world have become alarmed by the rapid spread of the coronavirus and the damage it has caused. A weekly survey by Moody’s found that business confidence has fallen sharply to the lowest level since the 2008 financial crisis. Only 6% of businesses said conditions are improving.
The illness has infected more than 750,000 people and claimed nearly 37,000 lives worldwide, and market experts are concerned that the pandemic could disrupt global supply chains and drive the global economy into recession.
To reduce the potential spread of the coronavirus and not to harm the business any further, many big tech companies (Google, Amazon, Twitter) ask their employees to work from home and call a doctor. Twitter has even made working from home mandatory for all workers globally.
These policies prompt other firms to follow suit — after all, it’s only reasonable to let at least some of the employees work remotely, for their own safety and for the sake of business.
But then, a question might arise: if you, as a company owner, want a part of your team to work from home, how do you decide who needs to, well, stay home?
When faced with this question, the Dasha AI team came up with an elegant and effective solution. Since we are creating a voice conversational AI with a current focus on call automation in any business area, our engineers wondered: if our AI can replace first-line operators on incoming calls, handle additional sales, delivery confirmation, NPS surveys and many other things… why can’t Dasha help prevent the coronavirus from spreading further?
So the team developed and implemented a scenario where Dasha calls a company’s employees in the morning and asks them how they are feeling today.
It goes like this:
The answers then get processed, summarized and sent to the HR department. Dasha makes a decision on the spot whether an employee can come to the office or should stay at home and call a doctor.
To test this scenario, we first launched it in our own company. No sign of the coronavirus so far — no other epidemics as well. That way, even the slightest cold can’t harm our team or business in any way, which is a huge relief these days.
This is a small step, of course, but also an effective way to protect your employees and a cost-saving solution that shows one of the many ways Dasha can help make our lives easier — especially during these hard times.
