AIMultiple ResearchAIMultiple Research

3 Ways Digital Worker Technology Transforms Future of Work in '24

The way we work has changed due to significant technological breakthroughs. Robotic process automation (RPA), for instance, is replacing human effort in repetitive tasks in many sectors. This allows employees more time to focus on tasks that require more:

  • Creativity 
  • Human interaction 
  • Emotional intelligence

Digital worker technology is an emerging automation tool that executives are rarely aware of. It has the potential to transform the workplace. Digital workers, also called digital employees, can act as “junior staff” supporting their human counterparts by learning, recording, and replicating their tasks.

In this article, we explain:

  • The emerging concept of digital employees
  • Three ways that digital workers are reshaping the future of work
  • How businesses should prepare for the transition.

What is a digital worker?

A digital worker is a computer/software-based employee that can handle a wide range of tasks. Digital workers fall under the category of intelligent/cognitive automation, which integrates RPA with a variety of AI models, such as:

Thanks to these technologies, digital workers can:

  • Communicate with people, 
  • Understand their requests, 
  • Infer meaning from unstructured data, 
  • Make decisions,
  • Continuously learn from interactions with humans 

In the workplace, these abilities allow them to: 

  • Schedule meetings
  • Prepare documents for meetings
  • Procure approval 
  • Prepare sales proposals
  • Detect fraud
  • Analyze and process claims

Digital workers empower firms’ human capital by automating a variety of jobs. People no longer need to waste their time on non-creative jobs that might consume most of an employee’s time. For instance, according to Accenture, a typical insurance underwriting team spends half of its time obtaining customer data and generating policy paperwork. If they employ digital workers for such tasks, they can focus on more strategic issues like introducing new types of policies or engaging with brokers. 

The remainder of the article will outline the three ways that digital employees are changing the workplace, as well as our advice for how business leaders should prepare for the shift.

1. Increase corporate efficiency

Digital workers can work at any time of day or night. They are never sick or depressed. As a result, combining human and digital labor improves company efficiency. 

For example, a bank reduced the time it takes to approve 80% of loan requests from days to a few seconds. As a result, employees were able to focus on more crucial cases  (20% of loan requests), which digital workers were unable to complete.

Alleviate employees’ mental health challenges

Repetitive tasks in the workplace also threaten employees’ mental health. Exposure to repetitive tasks for a long period of time is associated with:

  • Boredom
  • Carelessness in completing tasks 
  • Higher willingness to switch jobs 

Thus, passing repetitive tasks to the digital workers can enhance employee satisfaction as well as retention, which is beneficial for improving long term efficiency of the firm.

Recommendations: To boost corporate efficiency effectively:

  • Adopt process mining to identify automation opportunities that yield the largest ROI
  • Beware of integration gaps. Since digital workers is an emerging technology, it may not be integrated to your company’s core systems. It would be wise to check integration capabilities of vendors before procuring digital workers

2. Create new job opportunities

Employees have a natural tendency to think that automation and technological advancements will threaten their jobs. This perception can undermine or slow down the digital transformation efforts of companies that lead automation (including digital workers).

Although fear of losing one’s job is not entirely inaccurate, it accounts for a minor part of the picture. ~5% of jobs are estimated to be entirely automatable with today’s technology. Despite the fact that there is potential for automation in 95% of professions, it is impossible to replace humans completely.

Automation technologies such as digital workers will free up time for individuals to deal with more value added activities. This viewpoint is supported by the World Economic Forum’s research, which considers automation technologies such as digital workers, as creators of demand for new job opportunities.

What types of occupations will be created by digital workers? 

This is a question that has a variety of responses depending on the field that the company is active in. For instance, as with our insurance underwriting example, if digital workers extract the data and handle the paperwork, underwriters can focus on new policy innovations or their broker relationships. 

However, according to Dell’s estimate, more than 80% of occupations of 2030 have yet to be discovered. Thus, the current paradigm can make it difficult to define new job positions. As it was impossible to imagine, in the early 2000s, that a “social media influencer” or a “blockchain engineer” would be serious career paths, it is equally difficult now to imagine what future occupations will be like. 

Recommendations: Remember that people are one of the most valuable assets of a company, and they will command digital workers. To fully utilize the capabilities of digital workers, your organization should:

  • Be informed that your digitalization process is not intended to replace human staff, but rather to enhance their creativity by automating repetitive tasks.
  • The use of digital workers necessitates a significant adjustment in company practices. People resist change. Explaining the company’s vision and the justification for investment can facilitate the implementation of digital workers. The company’s CIO and board of directors should communicate with executives and other stakeholders to explain the investment rationale.
  • To find the best way of your division of labor after implementing digital workers you should:
    • Experiment: One of the best digital transformation practices is taking calculated risks. As a result, experiment with innovative ways to benefit from digital workers and your staff.
    • Free exchange of ideas can be facilitated by corporate culture. Your employees can assist you in identifying their new career paths. 

3. Increase the importance of soft skills

As we mentioned, digital workers lead employees to concentrate on business strategy, new products or services, and client relations, among other things. To put it another way, machines can make people’s jobs more engaging.

As seen in Figure 1, the demand for specific jobs is increasing in the age of automation. Some of these are technical occupations like data scientist or engineering. Some, on the other hand, are about people, culture, product development, sales, content production, and other areas where soft skills are more important.

Figure 1: Emergence of occupations

There are more job opportunities today compared to a few years ago that require soft skills.
Source: World Economic Forum

It is worth mentioning that intelligent automation features like digital workers are relatively new technology as compared to simple RPA. Because digital workers can understand data and perform tasks like calculating the best potential discount rate, the expansion of the technology may diminish demand for certain skills. 

As a result, AIMultiple predicts that soft skills, like the followings, will grow more important for organizations:

  • Creativity: Employees with less repetitive duties, will spend more time on tasks that demand creativity such as process improvements, strategy, and designing new products/services.
  • Emotional Intelligence (EQ): Empathy, collaboration, and strong morality are all characteristics of EQ. People’s EQ will become a more valuable asset as they spend more time with consumers and other employees to make strategic collaborations.
  • Communication skills: The ability to clearly get your message across as well to respectfully listen to others’ opinions and input will become more important. 
  • Leadership: The organizational structure was flattened by automation and technological advancements, and this process is continuing owing to innovations like digital workers. Because of the lack of authority in flat organizations, each person needs to display leadership capabilities when required. As a result, recruiters will place a greater emphasis on leadership skills in the future.

Recommendations: HR policies of companies should be adjusted since after ubiquitous use of digital workers, the importance of soft skills will increase. HR policy should focus on:

  • Training of existing employees in a way that they can improve their soft skills
  • Redefine its recruitment processes and targets accordingly

If you are looking for a suitable vendor that deploys digital workers for your business reach us:

Find the Right Vendors
Access Cem's 2 decades of B2B tech experience as a tech consultant, enterprise leader, startup entrepreneur & industry analyst. Leverage insights informing top Fortune 500 every month.
Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst
Follow on

Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst

Cem has been the principal analyst at AIMultiple since 2017. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per similarWeb) including 60% of Fortune 500 every month.

Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE, NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and media that referenced AIMultiple.

Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised businesses on their enterprise software, automation, cloud, AI / ML and other technology related decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.

He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.

Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

To stay up-to-date on B2B tech & accelerate your enterprise:

Follow on

Next to Read

Comments

Your email address will not be published. All fields are required.

0 Comments