How AI Will Impact Workplace Collaboration

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

This quote by Booker T. Washington perfectly illustrates the importance of collaboration and teamwork, and might as well be applied to a modern workplace.

Stats corroborate this idea too – 86% of employees and execs alike blame lack of collaboration and ineffective communication for workplace failures.

There are numerous challenges such as managing remote work teams or a massive workload that can be obstacles to collaboration and productivity in the workplace. Luckily, AI is poised to help companies tackle and address them in an effective manner.

When There’s Too Much Communication

It’s true that good communication is critical to effective collaboration, but more often than not employees face so-called communication overload. And that’s a huge productivity killer.

Namely, in a modern workplace (and life, for that matter) we’re connected 24/7 and we receive different notifications all around the clock. Business emails at midnight, an incessant stream of IM messages that interrupts our work, and social media get in the way of our productivity.

75% of employees say that constant notifications kill their focus and distract them. Sometimes muting your phone or even notifications from business channels isn’t an option, and it’s pretty hard to resist the urge to check your constantly buzzing phone.

Artificial intelligence might be a solution to this problem.

For example, Slack, a communication and collaboration platform leverages AI and ML in order to reduce this avalanche of information – it organizes messages based on their importance.

Keeping up with all the conversations on Slack can be pretty overwhelming – its users send approximately 70 messages a day on average, and it’s particularly complex to find all the messages that matter to you as they’re scattered across different channels. With the help of advanced technologies, Slack tries to identify which unread messages are relevant and matter the most to every particular user.

Enter Digital Assistants

Most people use commercial voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant every day for completing different tasks such as calling a number while driving, playing music, or ordering food. It can’t be denied that these intelligent voice-controlled assistants are among the best AI apps as they’re useful and capable of facilitating our daily routine to a great extent.

But apart from this mainstream use, these smart apps can do wonders when it comes to workplace productivity. Namely, enterprise-level assistants are the future of business. At the moment they allow people to join a meeting or call a contact using just their voice.

The idea is for these zero-touch, smart algorithms to develop further and be enriched with more powerful functionalities such as the ability to take notes, schedule meetings, or even assign action items.

Chatbots and Co-Bots

Work smarter, not harder is the new productivity mantra.

Intelligent robots will take over all the mundane, repetitive, low-value tasks, and allow employees to focus on the high-value ones that require critical thinking.

Automation will optimize different work processes and use employees’ skills and talents in a much better way.

Customer support chatbots are a great example of this as they’re, unlike human agents, available 24/7 and capable of handling a number of customer queries at the same time. This means that customers will get a solution to their issues in a timely manner and have a great customer experience.

On the other hand, support reps will be able to jump in only when it comes to some more complex queries. This can significantly reduce costs, as companies won’t have to hire additional agents to cover different shifts or an increased number of queries.

Similarly, co-bots or collaborative robots are used to speed up operations within the manufacturing industry. They’re precise and easily programmed which means that human error is practically eliminated.

What’s great about these AI-powered machines is that they won’t reduce the human workforce – they work with people and enhance human capabilities and performance. Also called, people-focused robots, co-bots pick up the slack when it comes to boring, repetitive, unsafe, or dirty tasks, which means that people can direct their energy towards more demanding cognitive work.

Break Down the Silo Mentality 

Communication between different departments within the same organization has long been challenging because of information silos.

For example, sales and marketing in many companies aren’t aligned which results in numerous lost opportunities.

Apart from establishing shared goals and setting up regular meetings between departments, AI tools are necessary for streamlining communication and enabling the free flow of information between different teams.

One such tool is Campaign360, an AI solution that provides valuable insight into the results of all marketing campaigns and initiatives so that it’s easy to see what works and what doesn’t.

With this full-funnel visibility and transparency, marketing and sales teams can collaborate more effectively, which means that every potential lead will be followed up. 

By making sure that all their teams and departments are on the same page, companies can tremendously boost their productivity. Artificial intelligence can solve numerous workplace challenges and significantly improve collaboration between employees and overcome communication barriers.

Aleksandra Simović