With the emergence of work-from-home and distributed models during the past few months, companies are witnessing an increased interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered conversational chatbots. While these chatbots were primarily used for automating interactions with customers and partners, this year they have been used to automate employee helpdesks as well. With leave, attendance, payroll, and employment details setting the bar with higher volumes, there has been a tactical shift in employees’ interest towards newer AI-chatbot offerings such as health and wellbeing, conversation enabled meetings, performance, remote knowledge repository access.
As per the latest report by PeopleStrong Alt HR Tech Insights, with a 100% uptick witnessed in health and performance-related queries, employees are trusting AI chatbots to guide them through these unprecedented times. The report is based on a detailed analysis of employee query data collected from 1.000,000-plus employee-chatbot interactions spread across 15 industries. As employees continued to work remotely, industries with distributed workforce came out as the most avid users of conversational AI chatbots with BFSI, retail, pharma, and IT industries witnessing an increase in the range of 30-40% for HR centric queries after the nationwide lockdown.
The month of April 2020 saw a massive jump in total employee questions reflecting an increasing reliance on technology to get answers adjusting to the new normal. Entry-level employees accounted for almost 50% of overall queries searching answers for fundamentals topics regarding policy amendments in leaves, payroll, and attendance management whereas senior management queries focussed on employee performance, accessing documents for sales presentations, reports, and initiating automated Zoom or MS Teams meetings.
Vipul Mathur, chief business officer, Talent Solutions, PeopleStrong, said, “We are now witnessing a higher focus on leveraging technology as an enabler for employee interactions. Also, employees across all industries are getting familiar with conversational AI-chatbots which provide personalised inputs, quick turnarounds, and access to the entire HR functions at their fingertips. We can see AI-chatbot becoming one of the core features of an HR platform in a post-pandemic world.”
