The Future of Work Chatbots, Voicebots, and Virtual Assistants

HELP WITH INTERNAL PRODUCTIVITY

Companies that are hesitant to use GenAI-powered bots and virtual assistants for customer-facing uses are using the technology for internal uses, Schuerman added. One of the most popular customer service uses is call summarization.

“We have clients who are transcribing the call in real time,” Schuerman said. “Five or six years ago, we had technologies that could transcribe a call after the fact, and you would do that with 5%–10% of your calls to do quality reporting or trend analysis. What we’re able to do now, and we do this here with a product called Voice AI, is transcribe the call in real time. Now you have not only the conversation, but also nonverbal indicators, like the tone, etc., that can be fed into other AI models, like predictive AI models, so that I’m automatically recommending things for the agent to do next.”

Pegasystems and other companies use chatbots, voicebots, and virtual assistants to improve their email communication, research work topics, appear more knowledgeable to their peers and leadership, and prepare work documentation to satisfy their job responsibilities, said Mike Manalac, CPA at Google.

Manalac said that at Google, particularly with the easy access to the latest flavor of the proprietary Gemini LLM, he and other employees are using the technology with bots and virtual assistants to get more work accomplished in less time.

Companies can choose to take on more business, given the added bandwidth, or keep the same level of work and reduce staff. “It will be difficult,” Manalac added, “for leaders to fully assess the skills and abilities of each worker, given many will use AI as a crutch rather than a tool.”

Google has sharply reduced staff. However, company management has not associated the reductions with the addition of the AI technology, saying it has more to do with rightsizing after adding workers to handle an explosion of business related to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Manalac.

He thinks the technology is extremely helpful to save time on research, documentation exercises, and written communication. “Chatbots, voicebots, and virtual assistants are fast becoming an integral part of people’s lives,” said Oindrila Mandal, a senior game product manager for Electronic Arts. “It’s clear that those who value convenience and fast results are switching over to these types of products.”

Mandal cited the following ways that these technologies are being at that company today:

• Code generation: LLMs such as GPT-4.0 can generate initial code if given the proper context. For instance, product managers and business analysts need to store and retrieve data from databases. Virtual assistants can help write basic database queries such as SQL queries to accelerate this task.
• Project management: Project managers used to spend a lot of time creating templates, timelines, and collaboration tools. With AI, it is easier to spin together a template for collaboration by inputting very rudimentary test data.
• Data analysis: Given a dataset, the AI virtual assistants can analyze the data and create charts or data visualizations that help employees quickly get insights.

“I think all these AI use cases are making work easier, saving time, and eliminating unnecessary administrative overheads for employees,” Mandal said. “I believe these tools will improve productivity for organizations and free up resources so they can be invested in real value-adding work and innovation.”