3 ways AI assistants improve enterprise productivity

For today’s knowledge workers, heavy workloads and slow productivity growth is a major challenge. Some products and services emphasize processes and systems such as continuous improvement and removing wasteful steps. Others emphasize the human aspects of productivity — a manager training a junior employee to take over a task, for example. AI assistants offer another approach to the workplace productivity challenge, but are they ready for “prime time” use in the enterprise?

As with user interface and design innovation, consumer AI assistants have made important early contributions that are finding their way into enterprise solutions. Apple’s Siri, launched in 2011, has a variety of capabilities, including performing internet searches and setting reminders. Given the wide variety of tasks it is asked to perform, Siri holds up fairly well. Siri, along with Amazon’s Alexa and Google Now, represent the “comprehensive voice based AI” philosophy. That sort of general-purpose AI assistant has much promise, but is also more prone to failure, and therefore less suitable as a workplace productivity tool.

Here are three ways companies are boosting employee productivity with specialized AI assistants:

End scheduling pains

Have you ever had the experience of sending messages back and forth to set up a meeting? It’s a common pain point for many professionals — especially if you need to include people outside of your organization. A few years ago, web-based scheduling tools such as ScheduleOnce and Calendly came on the market. While useful, those services have limitations. What if AI had a way to ease the pain?

Enter x.ai, an AI personal assistant that schedules meetings for you. Mark Tuchscherer, president of Geeks Chicago, a web application agency says he “started using x.ai about six months ago to arrange meetings with people in my company, customers and prospects” and since then has saved “about one to two hours per month by using x.ai to automate my meeting scheduling activities.”

“When I’m ready to use x.ai, I simply add an email address to the CC field and the system takes over in the scheduling process,” Tuchscherer says, adding that so far, x.ai hasn’t experienced any glitches often associated with AI or natural language processing. “The fact that x.ai specializes in scheduling activities specifically is likely one of the reasons it is so effective,” Tuchscherer says. 

The system integrates with several popular calendar platforms including Google Calendar. “Over time, I’ve refined my preferences to with it so that I don’t have meetings scheduled in the evening or at other inconvenient times,” Tuchscherer says.

The x.ai approach illustrates the specialized philosophy approach to creating virtual personal assistants. Rather than attempting to be all things to all users, x.ai only works on scheduling. Further, the service is designed explicitly for email use so there is no need to process audio. Founded in 2014, x.ai is still relatively new to the market. Like other software as a service offerings, x.ai offers a limited use version for free and paid editions that offer greater functionality.

Get new hires up to speed

The new employee experience has long been a point of frustration, with new hires wanting to ask questions to understand their environment and wanting the new person to start producing quality work. Remember the last time you started at a new job? You probably carried around a notebook to jot down the names of the people you met and the never-ending flow of company jargon you encountered, doing your best to get up to speed quickly.

The Society for Human Resource Management has reported that roughly 17 percent of new hires leave their jobs in less than three months and cite poor onboarding processes as a major contributor to this loss. AI services like Talla that systematize the onboarding process may help.

The service, which touts gradual information release and Q&A functionality among its key benefits, “comes programmed with hundreds of common questions and answers on topics like wage laws in different jurisdictions,” says Talla CEO Rob May. “We also use Talla internally to improve our productivity for meetings: Talla helps us to quickly gather data before and after meetings,” May says. “I’m seeing that acceptance to use an AI system for routine HR queries such as holidays. However, it is open question right now whether more sensitive topics — such as harassment issues — can be addressed with this approach,” he adds.

Does an AI service truly make a positive impact on productivity for new employees? The main benefit lies in reducing repetition. For example, rather than bombarding an employee with an overwhelming amount of data on day one, an AI approach is more gradual. From an HR professional’s standpoint, this means fewer low-value questions (e.g., “Which holidays are we entitled to this year?”) and more time to work on value-added activities like leadership training and building the employer’s brand. Talla is currently implemented as a text-based service and offers integration to Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Improving business intelligence

Extracting meaningful insights from business intelligence resources continues to be a top consideration for IT managers and leaders. Executives running a large business unit need timely, objective data, but asking staff for daily briefings may be too much. An AI assistant may help to address management’s need information.

“I interact with Sisense Everywhere on a daily basis to receive reports on the state of the business,” explains Aaron Hayes, enterprise software architect at Premium Retail Services. Sisense Everywhere integrates with Amazon’s Echo product to provide voice processing. “I typically pose around 100 queries per week to Sisense Everywhere. I’ve been surprised at how heavily I use it,” he adds. The productivity benefit is that it’s quicker to use voice commands than to enter commands in an interface.

The longstanding barrier to adopting voice-driven AI has been accounting for regional dialects and accents, but that barrier may not stand much longer. “We have a global team with people in Europe, Israel, America and other locations. So far, we have had a very positive experience interacting with Amazon Echo; it is handling those regional language variations and accents successfully,” says Guy Levy-Yurista, head of product at Sisense.

At present, the Sisense Everywhere AI interface is mainly focused on interacting with pre-programmed queries and reports. As with any new technology, the productivity benefits may change as it becomes more widely adopted. “I’m looking at encouraging our executives and managers to adopt the AI for their reporting needs,” Hayes says.