AI: Possibilities of transforming the workplace

A brief overview 

As per a recent PwC India Survey, 55% of business decision makers highlighted the benefits of AI for businesses outweighing its potential downside. The benefits include boost in productivity, access to strategic insights for decision making and accelerated growth. 

Over 70% of business decision makers indicated that the productivity and efficiency from AI powered solutions such as digital assistants can be brought about by outsourcing repetitive job elements like writing and responding to emails, entering timesheet hours and scheduling and updating calendars, to name a few.

Can AI improve efficiency at the workplace? 

At the workplace, the advent of AI-powered solutions (such as digital assistants) are expected to hold the potential for automating a number of time-consuming, repetitive and less value-added tasks. It can be expected that these automations would free up employees’ times to pursue new innovative opportunities. At the same time, AI advisors (machines and systems that gauge employees’ progress and performance and are responsible for their growth and deliverables) at the workplace are expected to help create a more balanced workload and increase working flexibility. 

Business decision makers across industries and functions are actively exploring the benefits of humans and machines working together. When asked about which AI-powered solutions they perceived to be of high impact, nearly 51% responded by choosing Machine Learning, while Virtual Private Assistants, Decision Support Systems, and Automated research and information aggregation solutions closely followed as some of the other solutions with high perceived impact (nearly 40% of responses each).

Will businesses be comfortable with an AI powered appraisal system? 

An AI advisor assisting in promotions and pay raises was also met with positivity. About 83% of the decision makers showed faith in AI advisors to be either more or at least equally fair in giving promotions and raises compared to their human counterparts. At the same time, 75% of the decision makers trusted either an AI advisor only or a combination of human and AI advisors over a purely human advisor to make the ultimate decision regarding their promotions. 

How AI advisors are perceived in terms of fairness in giving promotions and raises 

If you were up for a promotion against another employee, who would you want to make the decision?

How can an AI system’s actions be understood? 

AI systems entrusted to conduct critical functions, such as performance evaluations, need to be both responsible and explainable. Responsible AI ensures that its workings are aligned to ethical standards and social norms pertinent to the scope of operations. This helps to prevent, or at least minimise, potential biases in outcomes. Explainable AI, on the other hand, ensures that the inner workings of the AI system are transparent and well understood by the system owners and administrators. Thus, its outcomes can be explained beyond reasonable doubt or ambiguity, in the above case, helping build trust among employees.

What are the barriers in utilising AI? 

While the above observations underline the favourable impact of AI integration for businesses, potential barriers were also identified. The most common being high costs. Other concerns included skill gap (i.e, the lack of technical abilities among employees), lack of quality data for building effective AI applications, privacy and trust. As AI innovation and the overall technology ecosystem advances, hardware and platforms for storage and data processing are becoming more affordable. Hence, cost as an inhibitory factor may become less relevant over time.