For years organisations have been working on finding innovative ways to help support and enhance staff productivity.
This includes fine tuning business processes, strengthening employee engagement, aligning business models, staff moral boosts, investing in systems that provide timely information for people to make decisions and now systems that can make decisions for people on the basis of historic data and various algorithms along with automating task outcomes and enhanced user communications via Bots.
Typically Bots and Intelligent Chatbots are used to either –
- automate conversations with users and provide them with relevant information (e.g. information on Weather, help on topics, how to’s within organisations etc.)
- to automate tasks and outcomes between various systems and applications (e.g.: ability to call for an Uber cab via Facebook messenger as described here)
Most of us are already using a bot on our phone (SIRI/Google Now/Crotona and more). An article from Sydney Morning Herald described Chatbots as your newest, dumbest co-workers.
Bots can be used to further extend your Intranet and Knowledge Management Hub for users by providing self service capabilities and for them to access the information via corporate messenger like Skype for Business, Slack or simply via mobile texts. Your users can do one or more of following –
- Ask for latest company updates including news, announcements, new starters, Birthdays, people on leave in your team
- Use Bot as a polling tool – “How about a team lunch this Friday ?” , “ What do you think about our meeting with the vendor”
- Bot that lets work colleagues put bets on the next rugby game
- Ask for information from your LOB systems like ERP or CRM including latest deals won, customer information including contact details and more
- Quickly get the latest policy document
- Booking meetings rooms and resources
- Help on certain topics
- Search and find for information on intranet and other data sources
- auto approve expenses/leave based on specific conditions
- finding people with key skills within organisation
Microsoft provides a rich framework for developing Bots that allows your users to access to all of their data consolidated from disparate line-of-business (LOB) applications, communicate over voice and texts and automate tasks. Bots are built on cognitive and automation platforms along with natural language interpreters allowing users to communicate with Bots as if they were a real person.
The technologies include –
- Microsoft Bot Framework
- Cognitive Services
- Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS)
- Azure Logic
- Microsoft Flow
A paper produced by KPMG suggests that the study conducted by Pew Research Center believes that that robots and digital agents which cost approximately one-third the price of an offshore full-time employees will displace significant numbers of workers by 2025.
At Prometix, we have already commenced working on handful of real life use cases and our first BOT is on the way, available for a demo early 2017.
About Prometix: Prometix designs implement and support Microsoft based technology solutions that help our client’s staff to more easily use and share information as individuals and in teams. We work with our clients to establish a structure that makes information easier to create, store, find and share with others. We’ve worked hard to understand how people want to access and share information.
For more information on our success stories please feel free to call us on (02) 8072 0666 or email enquiries@prometix.com.au
