By Alex Tebbs
Continuous advancements in the development of AI technology are encouraging more and more companies to introduce artificial intelligence into the workplace. Businesses which were early-adopters of AI have already seen huge successes across multiple KPIs and are now running highly effective business strategies.
But the introduction of AI can be a worrying prospect for employees, and it is natural to be wary of things we don’t fully understand. Therefore, it’s important that companies which do look to harness the power of AI, effectively convey the benefits that it will bring to the current workforce. Here are just some of the ways which artificial intelligence can create a better working environment for your employees.
Efficiency
AI can be a great tool for improving the efficiency of your teams. If you have processes that need to be completed internally on a regular basis, why not employ artificial intelligence to complete the process for you? This kind of hardwired AI does not require human input and is simply a form of automation which carries out tasks within parameters specified by the human workforce.
Not only does this get your menial tasks completed much faster, but it also frees up your human employees to spend more time concentrating on tasks which are more intellectually stimulating, thus boosting their creativity and fulfillment at work.
Quality Control
Even if your day-to-day work is something you can’t or don’t want to entrust to an automated system, AI can assist greatly with quality control. For example, if the AI system knows that the output of a particular piece of work should always meet certain parameters or standards, it can automatically flag when work is being produced which does not meet these requirements. This allows your team to spend less time reviewing their own work, and more time diagnosing the problems flagged and improving their processes, to reduce the frequency of the problems being flagged.
Communication
AI can also be used to improve your internal communications. It could even be playing a part in your workplace already! Microsoft MyAnalytics has boosted the Office 365 offering to help employees develop better habits to work more productively. Its goal-setting capabilities allow it to make intelligent decisions on how employees would be best to spend their time, so it can, for example, cancel planned meetings which it determines will likely be unproductive.
But the capabilities don’t stop there, AI can even help your teams to improve when and how they exchange information based on previous response data. For example, if your AI system knows when a particular department is most responsive to email, and that they prefer to receive information in a daily bulletin, the machine learning can flag this to you as a means to transmit information between teams more smoothly.
These kinds of insights will help your teams to collaborate more efficiently and effectively, driving higher performance and boosting employee happiness.
Recruitment
Introducing AI into your workplace doesn’t need to be limited to improving the experience of your current employees — it can also be used to improve the experience and interactions that potential future employees have with your business too. Artificial intelligence can process the information on how previous job ads have performed, analyzing content alongside results to spot patterns and produce a supercharged version of your job listing for maximum interest and engagement.
As AI systems run using parameters generated by humans, you could also input additional information to focus on improvements on specific issues you wish to tackle. For example, you could provide instructions on the use of gendered language, allowing the AI to do its job effectively whilst ensuring that your job postings remain equally attractive to everyone.
In this way it can also be used to minimize unconscious bias in your recruitment process, potentially allowing you to field a wider, more diverse range of candidates in the first place and giving applicants a fairer chance to progress through your recruitment process.
It is clear that with every passing day, more and more companies are investing in AI to drive their business practices forward and to create a happy working environment which allows employees to do their best work. However you think AI could benefit your business, it is becoming apparent that artificial intelligence is here to stay, and companies would do well to get on board sooner rather than later.
