Skills shortage demands friendly digital help for stretched teams

The pandemic may be over, but COVID still impacts labor availability—directly through sick days and indirectly as disengaged workers leave the workforce or follow the money. Enterprises need digital help that understands their industry, that their human teams can direct with ease, and that pressured people will see as friends, not threats.

Roots Automation is setting out to meet those needs with what it claims is the ideal type of employee—digitized. Roots Automation’s digitized helpers in Exhibit 1 include a claims assistant and underwriting assistant in insurance, a loan processor in banking, a patient intake rep in healthcare, and a finance associate with various F&A responsibilities.

Exhibit 1: Digital coworkers are already playing key roles for enterprise customers

Source: Roots Automation and HFS Research, 2022

Skeptical teams won over by relief from the risk of burnout

Customers are reporting successes, including the 95% reduction in manual effort in accounts payable at a large Australian financial institution, 80% increase in workflow efficiency at a public accounting advisory firm in the US, and 82% straight-through processing (without human involvement) of payments at a supplier to the US Army.

At the public accounting advisory firm mentioned above, the small team needed 12 temporary employees to cope with reviewing 35,000 e-filings each tax season. The existing team was working overtime every tax season, leading to burnout. They started out skeptical that a bot could impact their workload. But the digital worker proved capable of completing all 35,000 e-filings, raising exceptions for human review, and learning from its human coworker with each exception.

Industry-specific models provide a head start on processes, data, and documents

Roots Automation delivers with AI-first, coachable,  industry-aware digital coworkers. These come with industry-specific semantic models, giving them a contextual head-start understanding the processes, data, and documents they will encounter in each industry. What they learn with one customer, they share with other digital coworkers to improve performance for all their customers.

The digital coworkers use computer vision and natural language processing to identify screen elements and interact with customer systems, and self-learning AI trained to problem solve. They collaborate on solving exception paths with the human members of the team, communicating in natural language. Employees can use the same everyday language to perform fit-gap training in real-time, identifying and resolving where the process may be initially poorly aligned.

The Bottom Line: Automate to retain more of the people you need

Many feel overburdened and are at risk of burning out, thanks to the ongoing challenges of skills shortages. That makes digital coworkers and similar solutions look more appetizing to those human teams who may have previously been resistant. Enterprise leaders should see automation as an opportunity not to cut FTEs, but to support and retain those they have in challenging times.