Artificial Intelligence or AI Solutions are becoming more and more prevalent in today’s innovative landscape. Artificial Intelligence is increasingly becoming significant in our day-to-day lives from home to the workplace. Many of us might equate AI to science fiction and tropes of self-aware machines. But, AI is basically the ability of machines and devices to perceive the environment. They react to stimuli with actions that maximizes their chance in achieving their purpose.
Examples would be self-driving cars, self-stocking refrigerators and intelligent thermostats that regulate the temperature depending on the identity or number of a room’s occupants. These examples apply to both homes and workplaces. But the workplace nowadays require AI solutions that are less mundane.
It is surprising how many AI solutions are now being marketed for the workplace. These solutions range from recruitment, administrative tasks to employee tracking and security. As well as and logistics and package delivery. Many of these solutions are already in use by Fortune 500 companies.
Below are some examples of workplace aspects and their respective AI solutions.
Recruitment, Technical Support, Marketing
AI-enabled chatbots are also used to assist in these workplace aspects. These solutions are meant to be in the forefront. They assist and engage in the easier aspects of these tasks. They aren’t meant to replace the professionals that remain essential in these departments. In the recruitment area, for example, AI chatbots assist in the screening and sorting of potential candidates. They go as far as to use natural language and apply concepts of neuroscience to gauge the competence of candidates.
The advantage of using AI for screening is that they can go past the boundaries of gender, religion, race or economic status in their screening process. Pymetrics is one company that supports such boundaries. The same is true for Montage, which is already in use in some Fortune 500 companies.
In the case of customer service and support, there are solutions, like Kayak. Kayak works with Messenger to plan flight and hotel bookings. Employees can use an AI Solution called Spoke to search for whatever they require from various sources such as Slack, SMS, email and the Internet. This is more efficient, because then they don’t disturb their co-workers for simple work-related and non-personal questions. There’s also AISense. This is quite useful during meetings. It can record meetings and automatically transcribe them into searchable text. This applies to recorded calls as well.
Manual Labor and AI Solutions
Other types of AI solutions offer robotic demonstrations shown by Boston Dynamics. They have created humanoid and canine robots. Very soon they’ll be out in the field and just recently, Spot, their robotic dog that can climb stairs and open doors is now being tested by Massachusetts’ State Police Bomb Squad.
There are also plenty of videos showing their humanoid robots carrying crates and boxes from place to place basically doing warehouse work. The Domino’s pizza chain is also already using robots to deliver their pizzas. Another aspect of manual labor is driving. AI-driven driverless cars are now available and in research stages by several companies including Uber. Tesla cars with rudimentary AI autopilot have also been ferrying people to and from work for years. Inside the workplace itself, Segway has created a delivery robot that’s able to navigate corridors to deliver packages from desk to desk.
Surveillance and AI Solutions
Now the problem with humans is that they’re frail and fallible. AI solutions seek to improve that not by replacing humans but by improving behavior and monitoring health through surveillance. Time is of the essence for companies like Activision that they offer incentives for employees who would allow themselves to be outfitted with tracking devices that monitor their health. Other companies even track the frequency of bathroom breaks, monitor emails and check voice conversations for stress levels. This approach hearkens back to 1984 but is being justified for health reasons and avoiding other issues such as bullying and harassment.
There are many other AI solutions out there for the workplace and it is clear that artificial intelligence will soon play a bigger role in more and more workplaces.