Integrating AI & Automation for Digital Workplace Communication & Collaboration

As with the assembly line, the integration of digital transformation technologies in the workforce has the potential to redefine productivity. 2015 was heralded as ‘The Year of Digital Transformation’, with Forrester projecting a 15% productivity boost by 2020 through the digitalization of workforces. However, a decade later, a staggering 70% (percentage) of digital transformation initiatives, including those centered around a digitalized workforce, had failed to achieve their intended outcomes. The reason? The lack of a robust (digital workplace) collaboration and communication foundation to drive its implementation within organizations. This underscores the need for transformative technologies that streamline collaborative efforts within the digital workplace.

Generative AI and automation are digital transformative solutions that have the potential to revolutionize communication and collaboration within the digital workplace. When used effectively, these tools can breathe new life into your digital workplace, driving growth and productivity. Here, we will explore:

• The importance of communication and collaboration within the digital workforce
• How AI and automation optimize collaborative effort and enable seamless communication.
• AI and automation’s role in optimizing the cybersecurity of communication and collaboration solutions and services that enable the digital workforce.

The Importance of Communication and Collaboration in the Digital Workforce

The average worker spends 42% of their working hours collaborating and communicating with colleagues or third parties, and 83% communicate better using digitalized solutions. Here, third parties refer to suppliers, customers, and clients who transact with an organization. Generally, the collaborative process involves the transfer of sensitive information or data sets among collaborators. Hence, effective and secure communication processes are required.

The past few years have shown that when digital communication and collaboration channels data breach or experience downtime, they can have devastating consequences. For large enterprises, these consequences include losing customer trust, reputational loss, and approximately $4 million in mitigating data theft. On the other hand, globally, 60% of small and medium-sized businesses go out of business when breaches occur in their collaborative processes. In Singapore, 24% of organizations experience financial loss after a data breach.

Since Chat GPT and its alternatives became mainstream, many view generative AI as an oracle that generates answers to complex questions. However, Generative AI has spawned many tools to ease collaborative efforts within the digital workforce. Today, 92% of workers utilizing AI in digital workspaces speak of its positive impact on their ability to work. Leveraging AI, they have been able to:

1. Streamline Internal Communication and Collaboration

   AI simplifies and speeds up the process of gathering, integrating, and transcribing information from diverse sources. Hence, it provides workers with quick, accurate insights from multiple data sources to share with collaborative teams. Leveraging AI reduces the need to execute repetitive research and helps create quality work such as presentations, technical documentation, and sales pitches. Access to quality content ensures information is easily shared and understood, as the case of TechFlow highlights.

   TechFlow, an IT firm with a global presence, utilizes a digital workforce to ease internal collaborations. Despite embracing digitalization, dispersed teams from different time zones regularly misunderstood themselves and experienced communication delays, which affected productivity. The company integrated AI to implement its intelligent communication policy to deal with these challenges. The AI assistant monitored conversations, tracked live meetings, extracted data, researched, and answered queries concerning TechFlow’s business policies. Leveraging AI helped its employees follow communication guidelines, access, and share information with colleagues in real time.

2. Streamline Customer Support and Third-Party Communication

   Insight into customer likes, shopping, and behavioral patterns provides organizations with the tools to improve the services and support they offer. AI and automation solutions enable enterprises to turn customer data into the insight needed to deliver optimized services. For example, a large corporation with 5000 customer service agents wanted to reduce its resolution times and agent attrition rate. Leveraging AI, the company reduced the time spent resolving individual queries by 9%. Implementing AI also reduced its customer service attrition rate and requests to speak to a manager by 25%.

   Another example is Seller Genius, an Amazon-related brand. SellerGenius helps sellers utilize Amazon’s marketplace as a selling platform. The company developed AI assistants using NLP to help Amazon sellers resolve customer queries. With AI automated assistance, sellers could answer queries in real-time and provide efficient support to paying customers, increasing customer satisfaction by 40%.

Integrating Automation to Secure Your Communication and Collaboration Processes in the Digital Workforce

Securing communication and collaboration solutions is essential for organizations that utilize digital workforces. Today’s dynamic cyber threat landscape and the extended attack surface caused by digitalization make the digital workforce vulnerable to bad actors. It is worth noting that providing remote access is integral to the digital workforce. Remote access gives third parties and remote workers authorization to use an organization’s IT resources to communicate. AI provides organizations with the tools to automate the monitoring and management of digitalized workstations.

Cybersecurity tools such as privilege access management solutions leverage AI to implement security models such as zero-trust principles, on-demand access, just-in-time privileges, etc., to secure the digital workforce. Other options include using AI to analyze user access, login patterns, and user activity within internal networks to identify patterns. Automating the identification of anomalies within these patterns is the foundation for responding to cybersecurity incidents relating to collaborative effort in real-time.

Automating the security of access to the digital workforce protects the communication and collaborative effort going through it. For example, a leading banking and finance firm in the US struggled with identity management and providing authorizations for users within its digital workplace. Its challenges included a lack of a streamlined identity management process, extensive manual effort resolving identity issues, and compliance challenges.

The institution turned to AI-driven PAM solutions to fix the identity management and compliance issues. Leveraging the Automated Oracle Identity Management platform, the bank automated processes such as identity management, monitoring user access, implementing best practices, and ensuring compliance. The result was increased productivity and a 25% reduction in security-related tickets.

The Future of AI with Communication and Collaboration in the Digital Workplace

The process of automating digital workforce collaboration and communication is expected to continue evolving as more advanced AI tools are developed. Ten years after predicting a 15% increase in productivity driven by digital transformation, AI and automation enable enterprises to meet the dynamic digital workplace collaboration and communication challenges they face.

Your enterprise can achieve the productivity the digital workplace promises by:

• Identifying seasoned service providers of collaboration and communication solutions to partner with
• Using a best-in-class AI-powered platform to optimize internal and external collaboration and communication efforts.
• Secure the digital workplace using turnkey privilege access management solutions.
• Integrate intelligent document management processes to enhance collaboration in the digital workplace.

Integrating AI into your collaboration and communication efforts is just one aspect of optimizing your digital workforce. Successful digital transformation initiatives must also harness intelligent document management processes alongside a security framework to ensure seamless and secure collaboration. The digital transformation journey can be challenging and often doesn’t go according to the initial road map, and this is where choosing a seasoned partner comes into the picture. Learn how a partnership with Fujifilm can help.

How can we help?

As a pioneer in document solutions for over 50 years, FUJIFILM Business Innovation Singapore has a deep understanding of how businesses operate. Our mission is to empower organisations to work efficiently and effectively in the digital age. We offer a comprehensive suite of digital transformation solutions and services, partnering our customers in managing data to automate workflows, leverage data intelligence, and build exceptional customer experiences.

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