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Conversational AI and generative AI have unlocked entirely new business models and are shifting our ideas about how we organize information inside of our organizations. Imagine you want to request a day off. What do you do? Trawl through pages of dense intranet content? No, you lean over and ask a coworker and not just any co-worker, but that one who ‘always knows everything’. The one that is always on top of everything. This in a nutshell is the case for an internal chatbot: a single source of assistance for all your employees.
In business, it’s well established that you need to offer customers efficient services and clear procedures. Our hand is forced by the power of competition. But internally? Not so much. Often a new process doesn’t fully replace an old one or is simply added to the collection.
When you want to create a single point of contact and resolution, your team will need to work closely with all manner of owners and stakeholders. Information is usually not found in one place, but in many. It’s one the biggest sources of frustration among employees and undermines productivity. According to a McKinsey report, the average employee spends 1.8 hours every day searching and gathering information. An internal chatbot can bring relief.
There are two common approaches to building chatbots:
Wide and shallow. Throwing out a wide net, trying to catch as much as we can, but won’t go too deep into any particular topic.
Narrow focus. A deep and transactional bot that’s able to automate a limited number of manual tasks from start to finish.
In the first approach, think of your AI assistant as some kind of know-it-all, who can always direct you to the exact place where you find what you need. In the second approach, think of the AI assistant as an expert on a clearly defined subject who will take your query and take you through an end-to-end experience.
Anyone who has ever worked in a corporate environment knows that a good part of your day is spent on uninspiring tasks: writing reports, filling out forms, logging your time, ordering stuff, categorizing documents or sending out orders. Today, some of these tasks can be partially or completely automated by a well-built AI assistant.
Getting it to work might take time and effort, also from the development side, but it can exponentially increase the productivity of team members or managers, when you’re able to successfully automate tasks or quickly gather information that used to be hard to find.
Anyone who works in software and automation knows that there always is the looming risk of depersonalization. Some organizations might be tempted, at some point, to hire or fire people through AI. To reduce people to numbers and lists. To evaluate their performance by comparing it to hundreds of others doing the same job.
At CDI, we believe that conversational AI is a powerful tool, but it is still just a tool. It should be considered as a means to an end, and not the end in itself. We believe in building AI assistants with a human touch. Ultimately, they are designed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do more meaningful work throughout the week instead of browsing for an hour through Confluence to find the link to the app you need to use to request time-off.
