As a range of powerful AI tools evolve to influence more aspects of our lives, it is little surprise that people are concerned about the wider reaching implications, particularly when it comes to our jobs. In fact, up to 75% of employees are worried that AI could replace entire roles. These fears are particularly prevalent for desk workers – but how will the technology affect frontline workers? asks Mark Williams, Managing Director EMEA at WorkJam.
Much has been written about the impact AI will have on numerous jobs, particularly white collar roles in the legal, financial and media industries. At the same time, there has been an unspoken assumption that AI won’t have the same impact on frontline positions that require in-person interaction and human intervention. These are the same employees who often lament that digital transformation initiatives never reach the front lines, according to researchers at Forrester.
This digital detachment between strategic corporate goals and the reality at the coalface reduces job satisfaction and harms customer experience. Attempts to connect this gap aren’t always successful, leading to unwieldy, siloed applications that hamper rather than enhance communication at the frontline. However, this is where AI can now make a real impact and create a more productive future.
Boosting frontline efficiencies
Using AI to analyse data and effect real time actions has the potential to transform businesses of all types. You will of course still have people working in a retail environment, at a hotel check-in desk or on the warehouse floor, but with the addition of AI, operational efficiencies can be driven more quickly. This can benefit frontline workers and businesses in a number of ways, including:
- Task automation: AI can automate repetitive tasks, freeing up workers to focus on more complex and value-added activities. In a retail environment, for example, it could handle inventory management, and in healthcare, it could manage appointment scheduling, relieving human workers of some of the more tedious responsibilities.
- Improved communication: AI-powered chatbots can assist with customer service, providing quick answers to common queries and escalating more complex issues to human staff, thus ensuring customers get timely responses while freeing up frontline workers to handle other tasks.
- Data-driven insights: AI’s sweet spot is its ability to crunch vast amounts of data to provide actionable insights. In a logistics context, for example, AI can provide optimised delivery routes in real time, taking traffic into account, resulting in quicker, cheaper, more efficient journeys.
- Workflow optimisation: AI can take complicated workflows and suggest improvements to make them more efficient and streamlined.
Enabling conversational intelligence
Sentiment analysis is another area that is a natural fit for AI. It’s ability to crunch data in real time makes the process of interpreting and classifying emotions expressed in textual data the perfect task for the technology. For example, from an employee perspective, a large retailer might deploy a new scanner at the point of sale and immediately have access to the discussions employees are having about it, allowing any issues with the adoption to be identified and negative feedback to be addressed.
Similarly, when it comes to customer feedback, AI can create a powerful feedback-to-action loop. For example, if a customer was to fill out a survey expressing concerns about the cleanliness of a store, AI can process this instantaneously and create an action for the team on shift to address the issue, only seconds after it was reported. This ensures the customer feels heard and valued and that no other customers’ experience are tainted.
The ability to use conversational intelligence technology to provide a real-time pulse into employees’ and customers’ priorities, needs and concerns gives real insight and enables higher engagement.
Boosting employee experience and retention
We have already looked at some of the ways in which AI can enhance productivity, however, it can also be used to improve life on the frontline and make employees happier.
- Predictive scheduling: AI can analyse historical data to predict busy periods and optimise staffing levels accordingly, ensuring that employees are not overworked during peak times and can maintain a healthy work-life balance.
- Streamlined communication: By filtering and prioritising messages, AI can ensure critical information reaches employees without overwhelming them, reducing stress and miscommunications.
- Recognition and reward: By tracking performance metrics AI can identify employees who are excelling in their roles and reward them accordingly, boosting morale and motivation.
- Health and safety: AI can monitor working conditions and ensure compliance with health and safety regulations, reducing the risk of accidents and injuries, and creating a safer and more comfortable work environment for employees.
- Real time support: AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants can provide real time support to employees, helping them troubleshoot issues, find information quickly, and make informed decisions on the spot.
It’s about augmenting human capacities, not replacing them
While AI does have the potential to automate certain tasks, it’s more about augmenting human capabilities than outright replacing them. Ideally, AI takes on the repetitive, mundane tasks, allowing frontline workers to focus on complex, creative, and value-added activities that require human skills like empathy, critical thinking, and problem-solving.
This will transform jobs rather than eliminate them, with roles evolving and employees taking on new responsibilities that involve managing AI. This is a great opportunity to upskill and reskill the workforce, while improving the working environment. The rise of AI also brings about new job opportunities in AI development, maintenance, and supervision, creating a demand for a new set of skills and roles.
Businesses are also recognising the importance of supporting workers through this transition with training and development programs. So, instead of viewing AI as a threat, it’s better to see it as a powerful ally in enhancing job performance and creating new opportunities. This AI-supported employee experience drives customer experience in that happy, engaged employees are more likely to deliver exceptional customer service, leading to higher customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
By successfully harnessing these AI capabilities to more efficiently pinpoint business problems on the frontline and, therefore, resolve these issues more quickly and effectively, organisations will become finely tuned and super-responsive to customer needs. Enabling seamless, instant feedback, empowers frontline workers to act positively while embracing new technologies and aligning with their frontline workers’ feedback, boosts experience for employees and customers alike.
