Organisations are strategically challenged to keep pace with customer behaviour. High performing companies that have committed to the opportunity created by the digital revolution, are outpacing established market leaders. Business, service, technology and commercial models have changed forever. Emerging technologies are creating a platform for unprecedented efficiency opportunities. Virtual assistants (VA) or chat bots are currently voted as the top growth focus, and Internet of Things (IoT) deployments are set to double.

VAs are helping businesses reduce costs by automating basic tasks previously performed by people, or by completing everyday tasks much faster. According to the recently published Digital Workplace Report, 62% of organisations expect VAs to have a place in their companies in the next two years.

In its report “Hype Cycle for the Digital Workplace, 2017”, Gartner suggests that businesses that have not begun the process of deploying VAs to interact with customers and employees should start now. Organisations should closely monitor the use of VAs and be prepared to hand off to human agents to ensure customer satisfaction.

The role of VA in enabling efficiencies automating meetings, boosting productivity, enhancing accessibility, enabling human like interactions and data surfacing has been constantly ramping up and is expected to reach optimal levels of operation by 2019-2020. This in turn is opening a plethora of opportunities for users and technology providers alike. VA will continue to be a prime focus in the current context as also the immediate future.

The workplace in today’s enterprise is way different than what it was even a few years back. In the earlier days every employee used to be tied to a desk and had their own designated place of work. In the digital enterprise today, even a designated workplace can be done away with the concept of “hot desking”. Today’s digital natives prefer to work from a place of their choice, be it their home or a nearby cafe.

Technology has come to play a transformative role in enterprises to develop a strategy to make employees more productive. It was collaboration technologies that made employees more productive. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics is the next step to come into the digital workplace in the form of Virtual Personal Assistants and bots. All these technologies and the proliferation of IoT is leading to a lot more smart buildings and smart campuses. In some leading banks, we are seeing a huge increase in adoption of digital channels which helps consumers carry out their daily banking needs. By using solutions like voice biometrics and bots consumers can transact while on the move with their smartphones.

Because these VAs are voice-enabled, they allow us to get things done much faster—you don’t have to log onto your computer and then onto some sort of system or application using a username and password to complete a task.

We have seen that digital transformation both accelerates opportunities and causes disruption. The objective now is to work towards enabling our clients’dDigital vision by enabling a slew of technologies that enable omnichannel, bots, human-machine interaction and AI.

Lux Rao is solutions director & leader – Digital Transformation at Dimension Data.