Digital assistants and how they are changing the working world
Over the years, we’ve grown used to digital assistants like Alexa, Siri and Cortana being part of our everyday lives. They are becoming increasingly adept and proactive at helping us with our tasks. The future of the workplace is taking us away from physical offices and bound workflows to more interactive environments via any digital channel such as chat, messaging, SMS or email. Gartner predicted two years ago that from an initial 2%, by the end of 2021, 25% of the workforce in the digital environment will be dealing with digital assistants on a daily basis. Consequently, it makes sense that digital assistants are said to hold great potential, as they can be used in a variety of ways and applied beneficially in any industry. Furthermore, they offer a new level of personalization. According to McKinsey, more than 50% of companies, regardless of industry, already use artificial intelligence in at least one business area.
But a chief concern is that digital assistants could take jobs away from humans. However, they are already helping to get work done more efficiently and increase productivity. Digital assistants have the potential to take over mundane and repetitive tasks, and leave humans with the more complex tasks and activities that require creativity and analytical skills. Therefore, we should be prepared to coexist with digital assistants. The still ongoing pandemic has also helped to accelerate interest in digital issues and “remote everything” as well as progress. The pandemic will eventually end, but many behaviors in virtual life and digital business have now become habitual and will persist. A feeling of trust in the use of new technologies has grown in a very short time. As a result, however, users are becoming more demanding of digital technologies, and companies are being pressured into offering better digital experiences while also being given the opportunity to better understand customers. Meanwhile, it has become about more than just projects with a voice-controlled machine – it has become a matter of applying artificial intelligence that solves real problems. Thus, the true innovation lies in the application, not in the AI itself.
Digital assistants provide the chance to create a digital workforce that not only supports but complements human workers in ways that ultimately benefit both B2C and B2B customers. With Conversational AI and cloud-enabled services, digital assistant technology can be effectively applied to external customer-facing use cases, helping companies meet the needs of digital natives and scale the omnichannel digital touch with omnichannel digital assistants. Most importantly, “out-of-the-box” digital assistant applications have been developed to augment specific business units – such as marketing, sales and human resource teams. In turn, their application is simpler than ever – there’s no extra software needing to be downloaded, and no new website or app interface for users to grow used to.
The Cloud Solution: The Oracle Digital Assistant
Oracle Digital Assistant is based on artificial intelligence and allows for a setup of self-learning chat systems. This allows it to respond to the individual needs of users and integrates as a valuable resource in everyday business. Furthermore, Oracle Digital Assistant can be connected and integrated with a wide variety of applications. Employees are supported, providing the benefit of increased employee productivity. Additionally, by using the Oracle Digital Assistant, companies can provide more and better services by passing redundant tasks such as customer service requests on to chatbots. Both the employee and customer experience is improved as digital assistants provide information quickly and easily. Oracle Digital Assistant is scalable as needed and makes it possible to provide personalized and proactive service to an unlimited number of people simultaneously.
Author: Rebecca Zerbo
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