With the onset of COVID-19, various organizations had to evolve how they work and embrace a more technologically friendly work style. Now that many businesses have fully transformed from traditional offices to digital workplaces, the next step of workspace improvement is upon us, and it is to create an intelligent workplace.
What is an intelligent workplace?
Simply put, an intelligent workplace is one that incorporates various software programs and hardware into the everyday tasks of employees to create a smoother workflow. Many intelligent workplace service providers even offer solutions that integrate artificial intelligence (AI) in their software programs, which helps increase the speed of many processes by automating them. Incorporating intelligent workplace solutions into everyday operations can surely result in increasing productivity, reducing costs, having easier and simpler work processes, growing profits, and most importantly, ensuring employees’ and customers’ security and privacy. But how can an intelligent workplace have such lucrative outcomes? Now that we have defined what an intelligent workplace is, we will delve into six of the main reasons why creating an intelligent workplace can significantly benefit business operators.
Intelligent workplace solutions drastically increase productivity and allow for a seamless workflow.
By creating an intelligent workplace, a lot of repetitive chores that are normally done by human employees every day would shift to AI assistants. For starters, no one would need to struggle with boring meeting preparations and tasks; any sort of organizing before, during, or after the meetings could be done by AI. Moreover, all the discussions and conclusions made during these meetings, which are sometimes lost and not documented, could be recorded and saved by AI assistants. If that is not enough,by using intelligent workplace solutions, any long waiting time for a reply after submitting a project request can be eliminated too.
According to research, many employees in workplaces that do not provide dedicated desks to employees spend at least one hour per week trying to find a workspace and locate colleagues. This means that in a year, an employee spends around 52 hours to find a suitable place to sit; now, imagine how many more productive hours per year that process would waste in an office filled with dozens, or perhaps hundreds of employees!
Intelligent workplaces, however, can simply avoid such wasted working hours. Using AI and other technology, company employees can focus on dedicating their time to only more pressing matters, productive works, finding creative solutions, and complex problem-solving. This way, all the employees can have more effective working hours, and consequently, the intelligent office’s productivity will increase, allowing for a more seamless workflow.
Intelligent workplace solutions make employees’ work easier, faster, and more comfortable.
In a workplace where every employee has their own AI assistant, everything will be done easier and faster. As we mentioned earlier, AI assistants free up employees’ time by doing their daily mundane tasks for them. This not only allows employees to become faster and more productive but also lets them have more comfortable working hours. No one likes to spend their working time on repetitive chores. By allowing employees to focus on more pressing tasks, intelligent workplaces can improve employee morale, thus making them feel more comfortable by only focusing on more creative tasks. Another good point to mention is that in intelligent workplaces, there is less of a chance that employees will have to deal with cruel time crunches. Many companies force their employees to work extra hours when projects are behind schedule. This process, which has become almost a norm in tons of companies, is really tiresome and bothersome for many people who work in big corporations. Not to mention that many of these crunches do not come with any increases in salary or bonuses. The assistance of AI applications in an intelligent workplace can definitely help avoid crunch times. AI assistants can do many of the time-consuming, repetitive tasks that keep up employees long at nights in crunch times! In other words, we can have AI help us reach a crunch-free tomorrow! Intelligent workplace solutions can even help employees remember important things without them having to recall details from their minds! Using AI assistants, employees can easily access files, information, pictures, statistics, videos, and any other valuable data, without the need to remember their details or location! AI assistants can also keep employees informed of news, recent updates, alerts, or any important information regarding the context of their current project or work. Of course, this also means that users will be able to change the settings of these AI assistants to personalize the types of matters and information they would like to receive notifications about.
All of the important data can be recorded and documented through the use of intelligent workplace services.
Data is one of the most important factors for any business reaching for success. However, recording data or analyzing them is a very difficult and unexciting task for many employees. Obtaining new information and data in various fields might not be hard, but it would take a considerable amount of time for someone to read all of the gathered data and find valuable insights within them. Not to mention that hiring a data scientist just for doing this task does not come without expenses!
Companies using intelligent workplaces solutions can easily use AI applications to decipher the obtained data and gain helpful information. These AI apps can collect relevant data, analyze and organize them, gain insights, make detailed reports for the company’s managers, and predict key business metrics the company should track. AI can also monitor activities in various divisions of a company and help its business improve. For instance, it can analyze customers’ behaviors, find out how their behavior changes throughout time, and issue a report so that the company can stay synced with trends related to what its target customers want or need.
Intelligent workplaces allow for easier and faster customer service.
In an intelligent workplace, there will be no need for a full team of human support. AI assistants can handle a wide range of customer support and services all on their own! Although completely eliminating human support is not possible for the near future, since certain sensitive procedures require a competent and conscious mind, AI assistants can perform a long list of tasks related to providing support, service, and problem-solving assistance. Firstly, unlike human beings, who can work only around 8 hours per day, AI assistants can provide services 24/7! Even if an AI assistant fails to resolve a customer’s issue during off-hours, it can document a fully detailed report of that problem and schedule it for an agent to respond to at a later time. Secondly, AI assistants are always fully responsive, whereas situations, moods, or tiredness can affect how a human agent behaves toward a customer. Lastly, AI assistants are programmed to save all crucial information and the solutions to common problems. On the other hand, human agents might not remember some of these important pieces of information or may not be as fast to gather the necessary data. Today, most of us get frustrated when we have a serious problem and the AI assistant keeps repeating a pre-written text about the suggested solutions, none of which has worked for us! But AI intelligence is improving every day, and in no time, their responses will be much more improved and relevant. Overall, the combination of AI assistants and human agents can lead to excellent results for all customers. This, which is possible using intelligent workplace services, eases the process for both agents and the customers who have issues.
Intelligent workplace solutions are less expensive and more profitable in the long run.
AI assistants can handle a vast range of duties, and they do not receive a salary at the end of the month! Basically, a company can do much more without increasing its expenses.
And that is not all! AI assistants increase employee morale, resulting in more productivity from the same number of employees. They also eliminate the time employees waste on repetitive and tiring tasks, leading to more creativity from the internal teams. Moreover, since a big portion of the company’s customer service will be handled by AI assistants, its expenses on customer service will be cut drastically.
Over and above that, AI helps companies keep track of changes in the industry and stay synced with the flow of what people want and need. With more productivity and creativity, and fewer expenses, a company can easily increase its profitability in significant amounts. In other words, all of the other factors we mentioned in this article will lead to decreases in expenses and increases profits.
Additionally, it has been proven that companies that keep their employees more engaged outperform other companies three times better; which, naturally, result in higher profits. But what is the role of AI in this? AI assistants can improve employees’ work experience, making their job easier, faster, and more comfortable, as we mentioned earlier. All of these lead to employees having a better work experience and get more engaged in their jobs. As a result, companies can have higher annual profits. In fact, companies with more interactive and engaged employees can be 21% more profitable than the others. It can also help a company keep its good talents happy.
Intelligent workplaces can keep everyone’s private information safe and secure.
In the modern world, where many employees are not well informed about the dangers of cybercrimes, data breaches happen all the time. As we have discussed in our previous articles, many of these crimes occur due to the mistakes of uninformed people, whether that is downloading disguised malware, answering a mischievous email message, or opening a wrong link! And many times, no one even notices an attack! With intelligent workplace solutions, however, AI assistants can be programmed to recognize such dangers and avoid them at all costs. Moreover, with the implementation of security protocols, AI assistants can monitor every section of the company and fight against cyber-attacks or alert the IT team in crucial situations. Even in the worst-case scenario, AI assistants can inform the company of a successful attack, allowing them to act fast and minimize the damage. After all, confidentiality and integrity are important for everyone, customers, employees, and managers.
Targus’s Miralogic: A solution for those looking for revamping their workspace.
Targus’ Miralogic Workspace Intelligence System is one of the types of solutions that can help companies transform into intelligent workplaces. This platform combines high-level hardware devices with cloud-based software to make offices more intelligent. It gives organizations more control and utilization for better decision-making. In future articles, we will spend more time discussing the merits of Miralogic and how businesses and employees alike can benefit from everything it has to offer.
Conclusion
Intelligent workplaces can empower various companies and organizations with smart AI assistants, which leads to increased productivity, better employee work experience, superior customer service, more efficient working hours, lower risks, as well as more creative and innovative outcomes. Ultimately, all of this results in more profits, lower costs and fewer expenses, and most importantly, enhanced safety, comfort, and happiness for every person involved in the workplace.
