How would you like to be able to concentrate on your actual work?
Of course, you could take care of contacting the people involved, moving the meetings and informing all the attendees yourself. Spending lots of time today, tomorrow and ever after on communication about such a simple subject. Or you could let artificial intelligence take care of it. Like your colleagues, you have enough to do taking care of your actual work, and the discussions in the break room will no longer have to be about whether, when and where who is meeting whom, and if there might be a clever solution to avoid having to deal with all these details. Because yes, there is. So, you see, even such a simple topic can have a very positive effect on the working day through the use of an intelligent solution. The Internet of Things is all about data – specifically, about sensible organisation and processing of masses of data. We like to call it ‘big data’. But this big data is useless if you can’t control and process it in a sensible way. Let’s stick with our simple example of meeting organisation, because it presents such pleasantly clear and comprehensible principles: digitisation allows us to access data about what room is in use when, and when which attendee is available.
Become familiar with meeting behaviour and use it in planning!
This data is already being combined to help us plan our meetings.
But what about if we could use meeting behaviour to make adjustments? Couldn’t we store information on whether meetings arranged by Colleague X are really always used to the full? Maybe that colleague has a tendency to always plan in too much time. The opposite might apply to Colleague Y, who is never finished, and the attendees of the next meeting are thus always putting pressure on him. If this behaviour was known, then AI could adjust the meeting times accordingly and perhaps plan in more time for the colleague who always overruns in any case. In addition, artificial intelligence could make the user who requires less time aware of that fact and ask him if he might want to shorten the meeting, if the system identifies that the time period would be suitable for another meeting.
Looking towards digitisation 2020, we can therefore say: intelligent solutions will help us to be more efficient and to use resources cleverly in future. We are familiar with similar concepts in the assistance systems of modern cars that brake and steer for us when necessary. Why should the office be any different? Organising and managing meetings? AI can do that as least as well as humans. And to be honest, we have better things to do.
Acceptance of AI grows after initial experiences
As soon as 2020, some companies are sure to use intelligent systems in their offices that could considerably simplify everyday work step-by-step on many levels. Those who try little by little, gain initial experience and get over the typical teething problems at the start will invest more in intelligent IT platforms. You can’t just say, ‘Right, as of today we rely on artificial intelligence.’ Many big corporations and also SMEs are working on making everyday life easier for their employees and making more efficient work possible with step-by-step integration of AI in work processes. No one will be able to avoid dealing with the topics of IT platforms, AI, IoT and XaaS.
External partners also make sense in IT
SMEs in particular need reliable partners for advancing digitisation. Previously, there were one or several in-house IT specialists who helped employees, mostly with Buddha-like calm, when they were at a loss with IT issues. Nowadays, we need additional expert partners to help us to find and implement the right use cases for our individual business. The vision for digitisation 2020 is therefore: who is willing to leave their comfort zone, keep an eye on their own business, competitors and the market and put their faith in intelligent solutions? Anyone who does so will have nothing to fear from advancing digitisation, but rather can use it to their advantage.