7 Important Tasks That Bots Will Be Able to Do at Work

Bots in the workplace will continue to change and transform, providing employees better opportunities to be effective and productive at their jobs.

Most bots available today only do one thing: provide alerts or information to people. One-way alerts from business applications are valuable and timely. But alone, alerts won’t accelerate productivity or response time if the user can’t easily take action. Bots must have two-way conversations with users. They should provide alerts, generate information or reports on-demand and execute actions on a user’s behalf.

Radicati Group reported that in 2015 the number of business emails sent and received per user per day totaled 122. This figure continues to show growth and is expected to average 126 messages sent and received per business user by the end of 2019. So the last thing people or teams need is yet another irrelevant alert to flood their phone, inbox or computer. People need bots to deliver the right information at the right time. They need a bot to send triggers that help them take action on the stuff that matters most, when it matters most.

Bots in their current form can store and use contextual information, such as preferences, dates and times, location-based services and geo-fencing to determine when to allow alerts and actions to occur. However, the highest-value bots also will begin to use greater machine learning and AI capabilities. This will enable bots to project actions or alerts based on a user’s past context.

To truly simplify application user experiences, bots must enable people to converse with the business applications on which they rely to do their jobs, just as they can message a person or team. Enterprise bots should communicate with people and teams through today’s preferred medium—texting or messaging. People should be able to talk to their bot more like a human, using common commands and social signs, such as an @mention, a “like” or a “poke” to shape the bot’s future behavior. Bots also must quickly evolve to use natural language processing. This will allow busy road warriors and other mobile employees to stay productive when out in the field, in the car, or walking down a hospital or office corridor.

To ensure that information can be received and acted upon, bots must be omnipresent. They must exist across channels and devices. They should be able to live wherever a business decides to put them. Robust bots also can serve as the face of a business handling customer interactions on a mobile app or on a Website. They can improve the experience a consumer has when they interact with your company.

Bots must carry the history of a conversation with them across channels, enabling users to start a conversation in one place and continue it in another. They should carry a living record of the conversation history with them, allowing a person or an organization to search through past dialogues, just as they would look through emails or other communication interactions between humans.

Developing bots with all of the capabilities listed above must be fast and not restricted to those with technical skills. It should be easy for a developer to add any task to a bot’s list of skills.