At one point in time, 96% of work was farming-related but over time, automation has helped boost the productivity of workers beyond our wildest dreams. Decades ago, experts told us the world would have run out of food already but they were very wrong.
The ability to control fire and make a wheel drastically changed work. Likewise, the ability to harness metal such as bronze and steel led to great increases in productivity.
From there (admittedly over many years) – we invented steam engines and locomotives that helped usher in the Industrial Revolution.
Mainframes, mini-computers, servers and PCs continued the trend of increased productivity and the changing of the workplace.
The next frontier for the Future of Work (FoW) is AI and ML… These technologies will continue to change the way workers get things done.
In addition, we can surmise, the future will continue with the following trend… Mundane, repetitive tasks will be automated, leaving higher-value work to humans.
Perhaps the most intriguing definition of the Future of Work is the democratization of AI.
As AI becomes more accessible, workers become more valuable.
Enter IPsoft. The company has developed digital colleagues which really embody FoW. Their tech helps handle mundane tasks – allowing workers to go upmarket and handle more complex interactions with customers, or in tech support or other professions.
Customers benefit from IPsoft’s Amelia’s functionality as a dynamic intelligent user interface (UI), but she can also be used internally to lower the bar of employee access to a company’s digital systems. Enterprise systems like 1Desk provide an autonomic framework for a company, and then Amelia working within that framework allows any user to access business and support systems using natural conversational language. By marrying backend integrations with an approachable UI, any employee can take on complex business actions regardless of technical acumen.
For example, an employee could simply “tell” their company’s unified communication system, “While I’m away on vacation next week, please forward all calls from my team to my mobile phone and send all other calls to voice mail.” Or an HR manager could tell the onboarding system to “please preinstall Chrome and Microsoft Office Professional on all laptops designated to new Sales hires.” Normally, these complex tasks would require additional human intermediaries to execute, whereas autonomic systems only require a high-level command.
Workplaces continue to get more complex and turnover is an increasing problem as the U.S. has full employment. These are two more reasons to automate as much as possible to ensure an organization can still function well when workers leave.
In addition, the amount of important data that companies have access to grows exponentially and having AI manage it makes a great deal of sense as it is just too expensive to have humans do everything. In addition, as we can see from Google’s news yesterday, AI can be better at many things than humans.
In an in-person interview with IPsoft execs, they explained their tech manages things far better than RPA that doesn’t handle change well.
Listen to interview of IPSoft CEO Chetan Dubai re: FoW.
The company focuses on the “automation of automation,” they told me. They have a coalition of digital workers who can perform digital tasks.
Initially, you have to put in the industry experience and at that point, they can evolve.
We’re going to graduate Amelia and we’re going to make her a banker. We’re not just going to throw a neocortex at you. We’re going to graduate her into becoming a wealth manager, investment banker, an insurance agent, a claims administrator, a risk analyst, into a healthcare specialist, a physicians’s assistant.
IPsoft CEO Chetan Dube
He continued, “By 2025, you’re going to pass somebody in the corridors and you are not going to be able to tell if it’s a human or an android.”
There are many companies in the future of work space but IPsoft intrigues us because they have a generic AI technology that is being adapted to various roles within an organization.
They have been at this for many years and have a solid lead. We expect big things from them in 2020 and beyond. In the process, their automation will continue to increase worker value.
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