Increasing productivity using Artificial Intelligence

More and more firms are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their constant striving for productivity improvement. But some are using AI to turbocharge the performance of their employees, not displace them.

Productivity is the essence of any business. Get it right and you make money, get it wrong and you lose money. While many factors influence a business’s profitability, workforce productivity is arguably the most controllable for the CEO. And optimising it can lead to significant financial gains.

This isn’t exactly new news. Well before Henry Ford was teaching the world about production lines, business leaders have been exploring ways to improve employee productivity. The Hawthorne Effect productivity experiment in Chicago in the 1920s is a brilliant example of leaders thinking outside the box in their search for employee productivity wins. That said – it didn’t actually work!

Chances are that you and your business have ridden the various trends; be it ‘digital-first’ for your customer service operation, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and – more recently –you’ve probably flirted with AI.

Certainly, if the popularist media is to be believed, firms will be laying off employees in droves as they displace their work with AI and harvest huge productivity gains. Yet research from Gartner suggests that, on average, just 54% of AI projects make it from pilot to production, citing that organisations often struggle to bank the productivity improvements of early AI deployments. This statistic can only really go one way as firms get a better handle on deploying AI and the technology improves.

There is a theme though to many of the productivity improvement initiatives of recent years and that theme is the displacement of humans from the process wherever possible – with varying degrees of success. ‘Digital-first’ initiatives in the field of customer service have seen mixed success – depending on your measure of “success”.

As firms have rushed to digitalise the customer journey and displaced employees with self-serve technology, chatbots and AI, customer service standards have dropped year on year to a current all-time low according to the latest CSAT barometer published by The Institute of Customer Service. And this trend is set to continue whilst firms re-evaluate ‘digital-first’ and perhaps pivot to a more customer-centric, ‘digital-on-demand’ strategy. Displacement, loved by the accountants, is certainly easily measured in headcount reduction terms, but is it sustainable – and at what other costs (i.e., customer loyalty) are involved?

It begs the question: couldn’t we just make our employees “better”? At some point in your career, you have probably lived through – or know somebody who has lived through – a HR-driven initiative to improve workforce productivity through staff / management training. It probably failed. Or, to reframe that statement in a kinder way, the economic benefits (ROI) were opaque!

Cut to the chase: if simply training your employees / management would bag your business a sustained productivity win, then every firm would be doing it – and every firm would have a Learning & Development (L&D) Director on the main board. The fact is, I can’t find a single firm who has an L&D main board director, who isn’t themselves a training organisation!

The brutal reality is that traditional workplace training interventions do not sustainably move the economic performance dial. For sure, there is often a temporary up-turn in performance (the Hawthorne effect in operation), but this is short-lived and productivity levels soon fall back to where they were.

But let me pose to you a theoretical question. If you could somehow clone your very best employee in each of your business functions, do you think that your business productivity would sustainably improve? I have rarely heard a negative response to this question – it is commonsense. Particularly when you consider the datapoint from literally hundreds of millions of interventions we have conducted over the past 11 years, that, on average, shows that employees are just 54% competent in-role. Meaning there is a huge scope for improvement.

The real question is: how do you solve that issue?

The answer is surprisingly by using AI. Not to displace people but to help individuals close this knowledge and competency gap. Advances in AI enable us to treat every employee in your organisation as an individual. To gently, collaboratively and supportively establish gaps and weaknesses in an employees in-role competence and repair these gaps in the flow of work, often using less than one minute per day of an employee’s time.

Elephants Don’t Forget are world leaders in this field. It has taken us many years to overcome the deep routed cynicism that (perhaps rightly) pervades most C-Suites when it comes to initiatives involving improving employee competence. We have worked diligently with early adopters to establish independently assessed case studies and use cases to the point where we now add a new customer to our “herd” every week and count Microsoft as one of our largest global customers. In fact, we are now one of the fastest growing firms in the wider HR / Workplace technology sector.

What has become abundantly clear is there is a huge pile of gold left on the table when it comes to improving workforce competency, which translates into sustained productivity improvement.

We call these ‘outcomes’ and our customers, big and small, use our AI to target valuable outcomes in their business. Often different outcomes in different functions, simultaneously. The simple challenge to you is: can you think of a KPI in your business that is either entirely – or at least significantly – affected by the competence of your employees involved in that task? What would a one percent improvement be worth to you? I say one percent as it makes for easy maths – we would never deploy if we believed we could only improve the performance by one percent – but for those of you who are familiar with the theory behind marginal gains, you no doubt understand where I’m coming from.

What happens when your closest competitor realises the value at stake for deploying AI to turbocharge employee productivity? In the UK insurance market, we trade with 9 of the top 10 General Insurers. FOMO undoubtedly played a role in executives taking some time to re-consider the value at stake for optimising every individual’s workplace competence.