The early “business machines” of the 1950s, made by IBM for large banks and insurance companies, typically took up an entire floor, not to mention countless punch cards and programmers. By the 1980s, computers had shrunk enough in size to sit on an employee’s desk.
Today, we’re moving into a new phase of workplace technology. Only two years ago, for example, generative artificial intelligence burst onto the scene with ChatGPT 3. Numerous technology companies are now offering AI tools aimed at meeting the multiple needs of businesses.
This post will explain how today’s digital technologies combine to create “an intelligent workplace,” one that can increasingly sense and respond to employee needs and deliver real-time solutions that improve productivity and enhance the digital employee experience (DEX).
Digital Technologies in Today’s Workplace
The global pandemic, and its resulting acceleration of remote and hybrid work models, has triggered the increased adoption of many digital workplace tools. It’s important to define what these tools can truly do before we can understand how they complement one another.
1. Artificial intelligence – AI is constantly referenced these days but it’s important to remember what it’s supposed to do: to leverage computing machines and data sourced from human intelligence that helps people make better decisions and predict future outcomes. Broadly speaking, intelligence can be defined as the ability to “sense” what’s happening within a given environment and “respond” in appropriate ways. IBM’s website defines AI as “leveraging computers and machines to mimic the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind.”
2. Chatbots are an offshoot, a manifestation of artificial intelligence/AI, leveraging data sources (typically internal knowledge bases) input by companies to help interactively answer customer or employee queries. I think it’s fair to say that chatbots are a more sophisticated version of a website’s FAQ page, one that learns from user interactions and thus becomes more intelligent (i.e., it does a better job of “sensing and responding” to evolving user needs over time).
3. Automation is a concept that applies directly to the workplace. It’s the practical application of intelligent technologies to perform work previously done by humans. It became popular in the 1970s when the first robots were installed in automotive plants, doing narrow manual tasks such as welding auto parts to a chassis.
When it comes to the IT department, automation can cover any repetitive human task or linear if/then process. While the widespread adoption of automation may have started in the 1970s by impacting blue collar jobs in manufacturing, today’s AI-fueled automation can do repeatable, manual tasks that were typically done by white collar workers in office settings.
Sensing Employee Needs, Responding with Solutions
The intelligent workplace leverages and integrates the technologies described above to “sense and respond” to human needs in the workplace. More specifically, the intelligent workspace streamlines workflows, drives efficiency, and creates better employee experiences through integrated digital technologies that:
- perform manual, monotonous tasks once done by humans,
- support improved (data-fueled) decision-making, and
- plan for future business needs based on historical patterns and predictive models.
The intelligent workplace takes repeatable, monotonous, and process-oriented tasks away from people and liberates those same people to perform more conceptual and creative work that cuts across different departments.
Benefits of the Intelligent Workplace
The intelligent workplace can offer countless practical benefits.
1. At The Employee Level. If an IT employee working for an organization that follows a hybrid work model has booked a desk next to the same colleague every Thursday for the last three months, an “intelligent” desk booking software system would identify this pattern and could suggest the same desk booking reservation to both people every Thursday as a default booking, confirming that both are coming in that same day via an alert.
In a second example, if your IT team always has a team meeting in conference room X every Monday morning, an intelligent room booking system could automatically make the reservation as a default and instantly send the meeting request to all attendees. A catering order could even be generated automatically.
As these simple examples make clear, the intelligent workplace leverages integrated systems and data to help anticipate employee needs and address them automatically, without the need for tedious manual input from people.
The end result? People can focus more time and effort creating value by doing higher-level tasks, and spending less time on repetitive, monotonous manual tasks that are better performed by technologies.
2. At The Leadership Level. Imagine getting a report, generated automatically each week, month, and quarter, customized for the key performance indicators that you’ve pre-determined as mattering most for your IT team.
This regular “KPI report” would give you full visibility and timely insight into how your team is performing, say, on key metrics such as ticket resolution rates, pending issues, team engagement, and more.
An intelligent workplace would go even further, making suggestions for action based on (1) the relevant data in the report as well as (2) benchmarks from other organizations. So not only could you see what’s happening based on the data, you can also receive a list of “next steps” or best practices to consider for implementation.
Leaders could even automate the taking of some of these actions based on your past actions, creating default actions that could be overridden based upon further discussion among the leadership team. In short, you’d have the best of AI-fueled technology and the best of human oversight.
Building a More Intelligent Workplace with DEX
Building a more intelligent workplace requires an organizational investment in workplace technologies as well as in analytics that leverage your end-user data and automation (fueled by AI) to anticipate and respond to people’s needs.
Of course, providing these collaboration tools isn’t enough. People must adopt them. Organizations need clear and consistent communication about the benefits of these tech tools as well as help for people in learning how to use and deploy these tools to gain everyday benefits.
At the end of the day, an intelligent workplace allows technology to do what it does best so people can do what they do best. Investing in a more intelligent workplace might be the best support you can provide for boosting people's productivity, enhancing employee engagement, and supporting better digital employee experiences.