Artificial Intelligence changed the whole meaning of technology, something that eased human work up to the extent that humans don’t even need to interfere. Machines can do things like driving a car, doing home chores, maintaining data and human resources without human interference. Artificial Intelligence is truly a gift that is considering going to change our lives for good and take us to the point of technological advancement.
Before we go any further, I would like to give a small definition of AI.
Artificial Intelligence is a field that focuses on building highly intelligent systems and machines that can work in place of humans or work to minimize human interference and exhibits Intelligence just like humans.
Artificial Intelligence has been beneficial in technological advancement and helped humans do things that were impossible to do earlier. And even now, in the time of this COVID-19 pandemic, Artificial Intelligence is helping us do some things that we never thought we would be able to pull off.
The COVID-19 Pandemic has shown us that remote work is no longer a luxury anymore; it’s the need of the hour. All companies out there are adopting “Work From Home” and making their employees work remotely. While this shift is taking place, don’t you think it would be very challenging to supervise the work, schedule the tasks to respective teams, and manage resources and productivity? Actually, No! Artificial Intelligence can help us layout effective solutions to manage remote workplace strategies and improve work efficiency.
Already, we can see organizations mass adopting numerous Artificial Intelligence-based tools for various purposes. From automation to boosting efficiency and convenience, let us look at five ways Artificial Intelligence is helping remote workers.
1) Team Collaboration
Whenever we talk about remote work, we inevitably think that communication between the team would be hindered.
According to various reports, last year, most of the employees worked around the clock and were logged in for extra hours.
The personal life of employees was getting affected because of professional life. On top of that, employers had no idea of what’s happening in their teams.
But thanks to AI-based tools, communication, and collaboration between the team working from home or remotely aren’t challenging anymore. There are various AI-based tools that help both employers and employees take account of their time, work, and efficiency on a daily basis.
With the help of various AI-based tools, any number of team members can connect at the same time to communicate their ideas, solutions, or anything related to work.
2) Making Meetings More Productive
Well, we can’t deny that meetings are always boring, be it an online meeting or an offline one. But if you think from a different perspective, you would realize that online meetings (done via AI-based tools) are much more interactive, effective, and productive than offline ones. AI tools provide you with insight that is usually not possible during an in-person meeting.
Getting information like how many people actually attended the meeting, how active they were during the meeting, and how much time they were attentive to the topic. Along with that, you can automatically record the meetings, capture and present relevant information or resources, i.e., videos, weblinks, and documents. All these facilities help save time, increase team productivity, and keep real-time track of everything that’s going on in the meeting.
Related- Artificial Intelligence – “Smarter Than Humanly Possible”
3) Back-Office Tasks
Artificial Intelligence-powered tools can help organizations to free up their people to do more creative, less operational work.
Operational and administrative teams working remotely usually have to take up out-of-office work and go out there to do things like maintaining company records, data, or basic administrative tasks.
Artificial Intelligence systems can easily automate repetitive tasks so that the employees can focus on critical tasks.
Advanced Artificial Intelligence helps admin teams to automate all the repetitive work and helps everyone achieve efficiency, productivity, and more creative power.
Working professionals have many important tasks which can possibly be done without human interference, such as Emailing clients, scheduling meetings and calls, and maintaining databases. Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence holds power to create such tools to do the given tasks and help remote professionals. For example, Google Assistant, Alexa & Siri can arrange meetings, manage data on user’s demand, and literally do everything mentioned a few lines ago.
Technology is expanding at a tremendous rate that people can stay connected to their employers and work without any hassles from anywhere they want.
4) Easy troubleshooting
Remote workers often have various issues related to their systems and tools, and without access to immediate IT support, either their work gets stuck, or they have to find solutions themselves—and this is a big hurdle for their productivity. If you look at it, most work-from-home problems are related to techs, such as faulty software programs, unreliable internet connections, or maybe some issue with their device itself.
With the help of Artificial Intelligence, people can solve most of these technical problems on their own. To name such an AI-based tool, there is a real-time AI bot (by Wipro HOLMES) that can answer your queries and guide you on solving the issue or troubleshooting the system or tool. As companies now understand the benefits of letting their employees work remotely and home and office gradually merging together, technology will continue to advance and adapt to these new work systems. Although remote work is a challenge for many people right now, these AI-based tools undoubtedly make our lives a lot easier.
5) Real-time engagement feedback
Did you know employees working remotely are more likely to leave a company than the ones who are working from the office? But why? The reason is simple: engagement! When your employees work from home, they aren’t connected to you or your company’s culture. On top of it, you never know what they are thinking about the company, what are their primary concerns and feedback.
Without having proper engagement and fun activities with employees, it can be easy for motivation to plummet.
Working continuously from home can undoubtedly make the employees feel disconnected from workmates, leading to disengagement and even stress, anxiety, and ill-health.
Fortunately, several new Artificial Intelligence-powered tools can help mitigate these problems up to an extent. These tools rely on NLP and sentiment analysis to reveal employee morale and activeness.
Artificial Intelligence systems can provide effective means of measuring employee well-being and engagement by doing sentiment and interaction analysis, highlighting where employees need help.
Such advanced tools can be really useful for companies that aim to understand and optimize their human resources. These AI systems can even suggest support resources and activities to help to make things better.
Elin is another tool that uses more than 140 markers to arm management with real-time feedback of their human resource.
Though privacy remains a major concern in using these tools, these tools still seem promising to help companies bridge the gap to a remote workforce.
6) Developing skills
The skill gap is not a new issue, it has always been there, and it’s definitely going to increase as we shift towards working remotely. Many experts from the Artificial Intelligence field believe that Artificial Intelligence can help tackle these issues and nurture skill sets. There are tons of tools in the market which use Artificial Intelligence to keep track of an individual’s knowledge level and help them advance their skills with proper guidance.
More and more cloud-based learning systems are coming into the picture, which helps their users learn right from their homes and even lets them analyze their current level.
7) Overcoming The Drawbacks of Remote Work
Following the various perks of Work From Home, it’s inevitable that more organizations will embrace WFH at a much faster rate. However, in reality, it’s not ideal for everyone. Some employees cannot contentedly work from home due to having a confined shared living space and always remain unsatisfied because they cannot join offices and subsequently find it difficult to become productive. But if from a layman’s perspective, remote work can significantly benefit both organizations and employees.
But to tackle the issue employees face, businesses are working to craft sustainable Work From Home tools to manage productivity and delegate tasks effectively from afar.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that the developments in Artificial Intelligence have proved to solve almost every issue we face, especially when it is concerned with increasing efficiency, productivity, and decreasing human interference. Working from home or remotely is the new normal in this pandemic. Even if you take this pandemic out of the picture, you will realize that working from home has proven beneficial for both employees and employers. This way, employers were able to reduce their operational costs while the employees could work in a free environment.
COVID-19 has made remote work an essential choice in aiding the protection of employees. This, in turn, is helping Artificial Intelligence experts to learn and research more about the potential AI holds in easing the work for humans. These new developments could lead to more opportunities and opening the doors for full-time remote work. And Artificial Intelligence can easily be deployed in regular organizational activities and turn things around on a brighter side.
Author Bio :
Ram Tavva, Senior Data Scientist and Alumnus of IIM- C (Indian Institute of Management – Kolkata) with over 25 years of professional experience Specialized in Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning.
PMP Certified
ITIL Expert certified APMG, PEOPLECERT and EXIN Accredited Trainer for all modules of ITIL till Expert Trained over 3000+ professionals across the globe Currently authoring a book on ITIL “ITIL MADE EASY”.
Conducted myriad Project management and ITIL Process consulting engagements in various organizations. Performed maturity assessment, gap analysis and Project management process definition and end to end implementation of Project management best practices
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