The Future of our Workplace: Automation and AI

Two words that have been bounced around by the media a lot recently are Automation & AI (artificial intelligence), but what exactly do they mean and how can they help with work life balance? Albeit sounding a bit futuristic, automation and AI are very much a part of our daily working lives already, you just may not have realised it.

Membership associations and companies are staying ahead of the curve by modernising and adopting these new methods to optimise their workflows.

Automation

Automation is all about simplifying your daily work practices. It can be incorporated into numerous steps throughout your day to save time and increase productivity. There are a plethora of online tools and programs that make life easier by automating tasks such as generating invoices, tracking deadlines and backing up files – some of these tools may even be available on your computer straight out of the box.

By going back to the basics and examining your work procedures you can trim the fat from any processes that are too convoluted. Setting autoreplies, reminders and recording data are all menial tasks that lend themselves to automation.

Automation is a way of streamlining your processes to create a more productive working environment, saving you time to spend on more meaningful tasks such as planning and development.

Artificial Intelligence

When I think of AI I think of science fiction, light-years away from anything office related, but it is something that is slowly creeping into daily office procedures across the world. It’s been found that AI is currently most successful when used under the supervision of a real person, rather than to complete a task by itself.

AI is commonly used in email spam filters to protect you from phishing attempts, and you may be most familiar with it in online chat bots that help troubleshoot customer service issues.

Most recently the availability of AI has come on leaps and bounds with the introduction of open-source AI chat services, which can be used to create a body of text to any given instructions. Services like these are now being used to create email and social media scripts, as well as write blog posts. Not this blog post though! I will be with you for a good while yet while we test technology in the background so we can give you our feedback on what we find works and what doesn’t.

Let us know in the comments how you see yourself using AI and automation in the future.