For many industries, the pandemic resulted in a shift in the workplace ‘power balance’. Most notably this has been exhibited by the Great Resignation, where job dissatisfaction was cited as one of the top reasons for leaving. As a result, business leaders are looking for ways to improve their working environment, particularly for tools that can reduce stress. Top of the agenda is the introduction of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). While these have both been available for quite some time, it is only recently that they have been adopted into most digital strategies, due to fully remote workforces.
As a result, backend enterprise has incurred incredible automation advances, with many organisations now solving much of the more mundane, manual labour and time intensive tasks within the stack. This move has dramatically freed up staff across all verticals, providing them opportunities to work across projects that need more creative thinking. In some industries, it has also helped address labour shortages, with effects that range from pressure-relieving to life saving.
How AI is improving medicine
Today, AI can process, detect and derive insights from petabyte scales of data up to thousands of times faster than legacy or manual efforts allowed. This is a key factor in its increasing use as a tool to alleviate pressure in the workplace. In many fields, this ability to use AI to work through and learn from data has helped to significantly reduce employee workloads.
Medicine, a sector severely understaffed as a result of the pandemic, is one such industry that hugely benefits from AI. In many instances, examining dermatological pictures, X-rays, and CT scans is the only way to discover the types of treatments patients require. However, traditionally, this analysis could only be performed by a limited number of trained specialists. Coupled with ever-increasing demand, stretched thin medical teams were running the risk of making potentially fatal errors.
But the introduction of AI is helping to change things. AI programs can quickly analyse millions of pictures to understand how to accurately diagnose risk. This has allowed medical teams to vastly increase the number of images they can process. In these instances, not only does AI help to improve the accuracy of diagnoses, but it also improves the level of care provided and reduces stress on the individual and medical function. Rather than wading through time-consuming analysis, instead human professionals can focus their efforts on high-risk cases, deriving final diagnoses, and providing concrete treatment. Overall, this allows doctors to significantly increase how many patients they can effectively treat and improve the quality of their work, all while reducing the amount of pressure they are under.
AI’s use in wider industries
Healthcare and emergency services are not the only areas AI is showing its utility. Almost every profession has employees that need to deal with high levels of pressure. Highest among these are workers that play key roles in ensuring complex infrastructure runs around the clock. Employees like engineers have to shoulder the weight of not only their companies’ revenue, but often the health and safety of the public too.
Included in this are the intrepid IT teams that monitor and supervise software architectures. Society’s growing reliance on tech means their roles are becoming increasingly critical, which only adds to the pressure of their jobs. Anyone with even the vaguest idea of the complexity and importance of their responsibilities will only be able to feel empathy for the IT teams who have had to tackle the string of high-profile outages that have occurred over the last year. Akami and Fastly, in quick succession, followed by several airline outages during their busiest season.
Operating around the clock, with millions of pounds and the potential wrath of customers on the line, for many DevOps and Infrastructure teams, the concept of work-life balance is alien. It is therefore unsurprising that workers in these kinds of roles will eventually succumb to stress.
But once again, tech can provide some of the solutions necessary. Reliable monitoring systems, based on software telemetry, and intelligent observability practices can help alleviate the pressure these teams are under. Rather than constantly trying to find problems, IT workers can rest easy knowing they will be notified if anything goes wrong and will be able to identify and fix any issues far more quickly.
Using AI in partnership with other technology
Working in tandem, observability and AI return power to IT teams by taking vast amounts of labour-intensive work out of their hands. Through the use of telemetry data, they allow for automatic and accurate recognition of critical situations and the detection of anomalies. Root Cause Analysis, generated automatically by AI, markedly reduces the time it takes to understand and resolve problems. And rather than having to manually oversee processes, employees can rely on their AIOps systems to carry the load. The result is IT teams that are freed from unnecessary toil- and stress-inducing tasks. Without these, they instead have more time left to focus on high value, revenue driving activities.
This must be the end goal for businesses looking to serve their employees. Through AI, employers can accurately root out the causes of employee stress and pressure points. The results are staff who have the capacity to focus on moving businesses forward. Staff who are happier and healthier in both body and mind. We have the tools to help, it’s past time we put them to work.
