Meet your new office assistant

Everyone’s had days when they think to themselves: “How much easier would my life be if I had an assistant?” Someone to keep track of appointments, reply to queries and deliver critical information just at the right time.

Blink gives everybody a personal assistant — they are no longer the sole preserve of senior management. Intelligent bots are a central part of the Blink experience, allowing people to focus on their work rather than get bogged down in admin.

Workplace bots are on the rise all over the world, as companies embrace innovations such as algorithms, artificial intelligence and machine learning that can automate routine tasks and make it easier to find and use information that has previously been locked away in silos.

Our bots are made for fast, decisive interactions. Need to check out the company’s leave policy? Does an internal abbreviation leave you confused? Wondering about the status of a customer support call? Our bots are built to deliver such information instantly, meaning you don’t have to bother HR or someone else in the office.

How it works

Simplicity is at the heart of Blink. We have bots ready to work right out of the box. They can do things like brief you on the day ahead, log a call with your IT helpdesk or quickly review a change to your compliance policy.

Making bots do all these things is easy. You interact with them via messaging, giving them instructions in the same natural language you would use to communicate with a colleague. Messaging is the interface to doing everything in Blink. It does away with long, convoluted email threads and lets you communicate with everyone more easily. That includes the bots and micro-apps that help you get more done, more easily; workflow and communication in one place.

Sharing important information, such as a policy change or all-hands meetings, is simple and you can ask people to acknowledge the message with a single tap.

“Blink bots talk to each other. No more switching between apps”

But our bots can do so much more, because they talk to each other. That’s artificial intelligence at work but what it means for you is a lot less hassle switching between applications. Companies no longer need to invest a prohibitive amount of time, energy or money into developing employee apps from the ground up, because Blink makes it easy. You can quickly build a bot or micro-app (a native-like web app that works within our secure system) that works across desktop and mobile.

For instance, you can build a bot that uses calendar information and is linked to your CRM system, connecting two key silos of your business. The possibilities are endless.

Simplification of the user interface.

The simpler technology is to use for your people, the more they’ll use it and the more they can accomplish with it. As we’ve addressed in a previous blog post in this series, clumsy technology is one of the main things holding so many companies back from their full potential. Blink exists to tackle this problem head-on.

Why bots?

Automation is here. It’s how smart businesses will get more done in 2017. Time is valuable, so Blink helps you spend more of it on running your business instead of getting buried in menial tasks. Just how big will this get? Experts say the automation market will grow as large as $9 trillion — with a return on investment for some tasks as much as 800 per cent.

Blink’s bots simplify processes and workflows. Relying on our bots is a great way to have your people get more done without cumbersome technology and outdated processes getting in the way.

If you’re a global business, bots can be a godsend to remote employees. According to a recent report, 51 per cent of people think a business should be accessible around the clock, something bots can make possible. Your traveling VP of Sales can use a Blink bot to access key company information at a conference in Sydney while you’re still asleep in New York.

Software should be simple

Businesses IT systems have fallen far behind the technology people use in their everyday, personal lives. The workplace is currently at peak complexity, with multiple systems and fragmented data. The technology people use at work is more likely to be hindering than helping productivity.

If businesses want to retain their best people, they need to give them the best tools. Intelligent tools. Tools for simplification. That’s the core belief at Blink. We eat, sleep and breathe simplicity.

Giving everyone their own personal assistant makes their lives simpler and is super-simple to do. That’s got to be a win-win.

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We’re Blink, and we’re building the intelligent interface to work. Blink connects to your existing applications and applies modern intelligence to cut through the noise, automate tasks and help you accomplish more.