STAFFING RESOURCE CENTER

Innovation is dramatically reducing the cost of artificial intelligence -- and organizations are leveraging it in areas like accounting, HR and marketing. Where's the tipping point for your organization -- and how should yours prepare?

Robots. We love them in movies, but how do we like them at work?

Around the world, we've grown accustomed to robots handling manufacturing tasks, and even more complex functions like automatically routing customer service calls. And we've welcomed advances in technology that now allow robots to dismantle bombs and facilitate minimally invasive healthcare.

But the idea that you could replace previously indispensable knowledge workers with inanimate objects? That's enough to give most employers pause -- and make millions of employees nervous.

AI in the Workplace

Could your organization make use of something like the human-like multilingual androids that greet travelers at the front desk of the Henn-na Hotel in Japan? Frankly, most people find these droids creepy.

Yet robots and their cousin, artificial intelligence (AI), are already helping with many aspects of our lives and jobs, largely unannounced and almost unseen. AI, or the automation of tasks that once was done by humans, is there when you check in at the airport without ever going to the desk to speak with an agent. It's there when Facebook helps you tag your friends by recognizing them before you do. It's there when you are asked to "Press 1" to refill a prescription.

Cognitive Robots -- The Next Workplace Evolution

Artificial intelligence is smart software that can fulfill a task formerly accomplished by a knowledge worker. Even better, a kind of AI known as "cognitive robotics" uses machine learning to adapt to changing circumstances, using predictive analytics to alter its response over time (think of facial recognition software, which gets better and better at its job the more its database of known faces grows).

KPMG Partner Cliff Justice last year predicted that Robotics Process Automation systems (RPA) would replace between 110 and 140 million workers worldwide by 2025. But that doesn't necessarily mean that 110 million people will be out of jobs.

Robotics will satisfy some of the future, growing demand for knowledge workers. Speaking at the World BPO/ITO Forum's Global Sourcing and Cloud Summit in New York, Justice said that instead of looking for "the next India" to reduce costs and increase profits, executives should be taking a good look at automation. "If you think it's ... going to be about low-cost labor," he said, "you're dead wrong."

The cost of automation is going down. And as companies grow, it will become even more attractive because once systems are automated, scaling is cheap -- while adding employees will always be expensive. So as the up-front cost of Artificial Intelligence goes down, cognitive robotics may begin to fill the need that outsourcing once filled.

But when and where should you start using cognitive robotics? Here are just a few of the ways that other companies are using AI and RPA to increase efficiency and profitability:

• Fraud prevention. Both retailers and credit card issuers are using increasingly sophisticated analytics to identify behavior anomalies quickly to prevent fraud and data breaches.
• Marketing. Machine learning can help create online advertising that optimizes the chances a user will click. Better targeting through predictive analytics reduces the costs of online marketing.
• Design. While design may seem to be the quintessentially human task, products like The Grid use AI functions to automate the process of website design, including smart cropping and proofreading.
• Pricing. Airbnb uses a product called Aerosolve to help its clients make use of dynamic pricing for their rental offerings. Dynamic price optimization uses machine learning to correlate prices with sale trends.
• Hiring. Predictive analytics can make the guesswork that is often involved in hiring obsolete, and can help companies better understand their need for contingent workers, leading to greater efficiency.
• Data management. Machine learning can help keep critical payroll data up to date and can even help integrate systems when companies merge.
• Compliance. Automated systems track and record everything they do so that companies are prepared to respond to audits and other compliance checks.

Are you ready to take the RPA leap?

Robots -- both physical and virtual -- are waiting to help you take your company to the next level. How and where could they improve your business? Start with a strategic analysis, closely examining the tasks that make up your employees' days. Where are the repetitive, mundane tasks such as data checking, data input, form filling and request processing? Where might predictive analytics help your staff to do a better job? What are some of the challenges particular to your industry that RPA might help to address? How might automating some tasks allow you to better use the employees you have, and to manage work load?

The answers to these questions will provide important clues about the smartest ways to leverage smart robots in your business.