Automation frees employees from high-volume tasks to apply their expertise elsewhere in the business. While enterprises may see automation as a means to reduce overhead, some of the most exciting potential lies in reapplying years of employee expertise to build new value.
With automation, people are no longer compelled to spend their time executing mundane tasks, and are freed to pursue more productive or pleasing activities. Why go to the store to buy paper towels when you can just tell Alexa to have it delivered? Similarly, automation frees enterprises to reimagine how their companies are organized. Why have a whole IT department addressing high-volume requests, when it can be handled by an intelligent helpdesk?
This trend of new possibilities will only accelerate as we enter the autonomic era in which digital systems will not only execute individual tasks, but maintain, organize, and optimize themselves intelligently; think of autonomics as an enhanced form of automation that can accommodate a wide variety of unforeseeable scenarios. Similarly transformative will be Intelligent Automation, in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used in the creation of new automations (i.e. automating automations).
While automation offers companies an opportunity to reduce human capital that was previously necessary to execute business tasks, it also provides an opportunity to reapply this talent to build value elsewhere in the business.
Your workers are the ones on the front lines of your company’s operations, so with that experience comes an intimate (and irreplaceable) knowledge of your customers, competition and surrounding business environment. You should leverage this expertise to your advantage through the power of automation.
Automation Frees Workers to Write Your Next Chapter
When your experienced workers have been freed from high-volume but not necessarily high-value tasks with automation, they can use that experience elsewhere in the business.
For example, an autonomic system such as IPvoice can address Universal Communications (UC) issues with limited-to-no human intermediation. This functionality may replace the need for a full-time staff to maintain, manage and optimize an industrial-scale UC system, but those employees’ experience can still prove extremely valuable.
To take the IPvoice example above, a company would have an opportunity to take advantage of the experience of its UC staff that is no longer saddled with high-volume tasks to build new UC experiences. With their existing knowledge of the company’s communication needs, these staffers are uniquely qualified to research, develop and implement new communication systems including ascendant platforms such as smart speakers, IoT or X Reality. It’s not so difficult to imagine how companies could reapply human talent with years if not decades of experience to maintain a competitive edge within an evolving marketplace.
Reskill Your Workers to Provide Customers Service
After automation, one particularly valuable sector for expertise reassignment will be in customer relations. Even if your customer-facing services are augmented by AI, human workers will still be necessary to handle unique or complex customer needs.
Digital colleagues such as Amelia allow customers to independently resolve low-level issues without ever interacting with a human agent. However, some customer needs will require a qualified and experienced representative to address their queries. This would be the ideal role for workers who already have familiarity with a company’s products and customers, and many of these staffers would welcome the opportunity to provide one-on-one service, rather than for example reset yet another customer password.
Create New Automation Roles
Another interesting aspect of automation is its power to lower the bar for creating new automations through simplified user interfaces and the automation of routine processes such as structuring unstructured data. This opens the door for all employees to build out new automations, not just those with coding or programming knowledge.
With that new potential in mind, who better to join your automation team than those who already come with in-depth knowledge of specific business areas? And thanks to easy-to-use automation platforms such as 1RPA, your employees will be able to begin on that path with limited training.
Some of the most substantial opportunities for automation within an enterprise can materialize by freeing employees from routine processes and reapplying their irreplaceable expertise throughout the organization.