With an estimated market value of $70 billion by 2020, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the technological ecosystem, giving rise to a new generation of technology which will transform businesses. No wonder there is stupendous amount of excitement and hype surrounding AI. In the midst of the prevalent hype and presumptions, there is an equal amount of fear and uncertainty lurking in the minds of employees regarding absolute automation of tasks and processes leading to mass layoffs.
AI Will Augment Humans
Truth be told, it is just unfeasible to replace human labor with technologies, however sophisticated they might be. Both of them carry unique traits which cannot be replicated. When it comes to accuracy, speed, memory, scale and consistency humans cannot match up to technology. But in matters of critical thinking, and discernment humans ace those areas. This is why AI will augment human employees by automating routine tasks and processes so human employees can focus on higher value tasks. The combination of human effort augmented by AI will enhance productivity, speed, scale, cost-efficiency and creativity.
Moreover when an AI application is undergoing training, human intervention and training is part of the process. So AI and humans will complement each other in the future, with AI ultimately augmenting the capabilities of human employees. Certain critical business decisions will always require a human to make them, so humans will still be crucial to businesses. Everything cannot simply be handed over to AI to be taken care of automatically.
Cross-Industrial AI Augmentation
AI relieves employees from routine, repetitive and mundane tasks and performs them more efficiently. While AI takes care of the data-intensive, grunt work, humans can bring their unique skills to personalized interactions while communicating with customers, which is difficult for technology to mimic. This drives the companies to recruit the best talents based on soft skills and creativity. AI can in many cases serve as a digital assistant to employees. Employees will find work rewarding and interesting when they are complemented with intelligent automation that handles routine tasks.
The retail giant Walmart has introduced autonomous scrubbing machines to clean floors and robots capable of detecting out-of-stock products. The human employees can handle the task of ordering replenishments for the products. These technologies are not replacing human labor; they allow them to focus less on mundane tasks and more on critical and innovative problems.
In the insurance industry, the claims handling process is a tedious task. This involves manual processing of various unstructured data such as the customer’s account number, license number, images of the damage, etc. AI can easily automate such unstructured data extraction process and direct employees towards performing higher-value and meaningful work.
In the banking industry, acquisition of a new customer involves collection of various types of information. AI has the capability to classify and extract unstructured data to automate recording of data into the bank’s digital management system. This results in increased accuracy and speed of the initial official customer enrollment process as well as heightened customer satisfaction level on account of delegation of repetitive tasks.
In the future, employees can realize their full potential when coupled with AI technology. AI is incapable of compensating for human skills and competencies like empathy, creativity, heading teams or formulating business strategies and tactics. It’s main strength is performing tasks which are recurrent and tedious in nature with the elimination of risks and errors while providing employees with the knowledge they need and more time to perform higher-value activities. Practically, most use cases involve the combined power of AI-enabled capabilities and human intelligence to progress towards maximum efficiency. Hence, AI should be embraced without fear and apprehensions.
If you would like to explore how implementing AI can help your business, the Rapid Acceleration Partners AI team would be glad to help you. Our next-gen, AI-powered content intelligence platform RAPFlow in tandem with our RPA solution RAPBot, provides end-to-end workflow automation capabilities that can be deployed in just a week. Please book a demo to explore how RAPFlow and RAPBot can transform your business.
