When AI comes to the digital workplace, it is not to replace employees, but to make their daily work more productive, along with increasing their engagement, reducing manual effort, and speeding up time-consuming workflows.

Technology has been making our lives easier for centuries. But now, as we're running head-on into the 4th Industrial Revolution, it's obvious that even the pace of change is shifting. Just a few years ago, it would be hard to imagine the ubiquity that cutting-edge tech is enjoying today.

Machine learning and AI is everywhere. In the last four years, the AI adoption rate in the enterprise has grown by 270%, with roughly a third of companies deploying artificial intelligence.

The workplace is not an exception, as companies are continually rushing to make their employees more productive. Today, practically any enterprise-grade productivity or collaboration system boasts AI capabilities. One of the prime examples would be SharePoint Intranet with its built-in AI features enabled through the Microsoft ecosystem. By exploring these capabilities, you can understand how AI is impacting modern digital workspace.

AI Mantras for Boosting Employee Motivation and Productivity

Employee motivation is a great challenge for modern employers. Nowadays, almost 30% of employees don't feel motivated at work, and one of the top 5 reasons for their dissatisfaction is poor business processes and technology. So, let's take a look at a couple of examples where AI can help employees spend time more productively with SharePoint.

1) Don't Read, Take Action:

• Social media feed analysis to detect and act upon negative sentiment
• Email text analysis for priority case identification (emails with the highest negative scores get into a separate SharePoint list for processing)
• Recruitment analytics for improved candidate processing

Each of these scenarios can provide a visible ROI for the teams that have previously handled similar processes manually, sometimes spending hours just sifting through emails and messages. With over 120 emails sent and received daily per business user in 2019, it's critical to cut some of the time spent on processing them with AI.

2) A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

It's worth mentioning that intelligent image recognition improves the overall content searchability as files get automatically tagged, thus saving a lot of time on each search.

3) Going Global

Some Bumps Ahead It's important to remember that the human factor still affects all smart technologies. Just remember the famous Amazon debacle with their biased candidate selection algorithm. Similar problems might surface in training images used for custom image recognition routines.

Another important aspect is how people in the company treat such technologies. Over 40% of employees are not confident about their ability to adapt to the digital workplace. That's why it's important to communicate the value of AI, as well as demonstrate the new horizons of their productivity with a renewed focus on creative work, not routines.

Sandra Lupanova is Senior Marketing Specialist at Iflexion. The above article is an edited version of the original published earlier at https://www.hrtechnologist.com