A significant spike in U.S. worker productivity in the last quarter of 2023 had many asking whether the growing adoption of AI and automation in the workplace was already taking effect. While it is probably too early to attribute the jump in worker output-per-hour strictly to AI, it does remind us that a future of human-machine collaboration is not far away.

Let’s face it, many business processes are repetitive and boring. Filling out forms, sending emails, and data entry can drain employee morale and stifle creativity. Here's where AI steps in. By automating these mundane tasks, AI empowers your workforce to tackle more engaging challenges, boosting not just productivity, but overall job satisfaction.

The hurdles to increasing productivity are immense. Think about your job: how many business applications do you use? Within those applications, do you know all of the shortcuts and most efficient ways to use them? Is the data from all of those systems connected? Most likely not, which is why we all spend too much time searching, editing, cutting, and pasting, once we finally figure out how to get something done.

The market is now flooded with bots and copilots for simple searches or single tasks. Most jobs today, however, would benefit from technology that provides end-to-end enterprise productivity and can stitch information and applications together to complete a task.

Let’s think about a hypothetical insurance company where agents must service their customers, but also cross-sell and up-sell new products into their existing book of business. Typically, this is done by searching a CRM system for customers that meet certain criteria, determine which products to market to them, write a customized email message for those products, then copy the email address and message into an email. That’s a lot of steps and a lot of manual work.

Most workers are already familiar with bots and their conversational experience, so what’s needed is something that can take automations, democratize them through natural language across multiple channels in a way that is already familiar, and invoke advanced skills or tasks that leverage generative AI. A platform like IBM’s gen AI-powered watsonx Orchestrate is a prime example of this.

_{Chat window of watsonx Orchestrate automating the process of an email cross-sell campaign}

IBM watsonx Orchestrate offers a unified platform for workers to launch and manage AI assistants at scale. It includes an assistant assembler to design and deploy sophisticated AI assistants that can guide users through complex actions. Orchestrate contains a catalog with thousands of prebuilt skills across HR, finance, procurement, and sales. Orchestrate offers flexibility, so it can connect to IBM automation systems as well as third party vendor automation systems, so you don’t have to worry about vendor lock-in or recreating any automations you have already built. If those automations don't exist, builders have access to a low-code, simplified automation builder. Workers can then build automations and trigger them as skills directly from Orchestrate.

Orchestrate has enterprise readiness components that includes catalog management, analytics and access and federated controls to ensure that the implementation remains aligned to the security and compliance controls of an enterprise.

By eliminating repetitive tasks, AI and automation allows employees to tap into their full potential, fostering innovation and feeling a sense of purpose in their work.

If you are interested in improving efficiency with process automation, please contact us to request a meeting. Don’t yet have an information architecture for AI you trust? LRS can also help you collect, organize, and analyze your data so that it is business ready.