Dirty, Dull, or Dangerous... from Mind-Numbing to WOO HOO in Weeks.

Dirty, Dull, or Dangerous... from Mind-Numbing to WOO HOO in Weeks.

The other day, I read an article about people working to disrupt the status quo. The part that struck me the most, reported on work to create thousands of little bots used to monitor damage to coral reefs. The creator of these bots, Harvard researcher Radhika Nagpal, spoke about utilizing robotics to free up humans from "the 3Ds:" tasks that are dirty, dull, or dangerous.

Similarly, in our work, we look to deploy a Digital Workforce to help free up humans to focus on more complex tasks. While no one would characterize this work as dangerous and seldom dirty, it certainly can be dull and unfulfilling. While our bots don't need to self-organize (yet) like Nagpal's swarms, they do seek to emulate human abilities and can perform without error, 24 hours per day, seven days a week. The rapidly evolving technological capabilities of computer vision, robotic process automation, and artificial intelligence allow us to work with clients to identify processes that can be seamlessly automated to free human employees to do more complex tasks.

As we continue to experience the "Great Resignation," we see headlines such as "Nearly 4.3 million people quit their jobs in January, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's JOLTS report issued Wednesday. That level is near a record set in November." Additionally, there are 11.3m job openings, and we continue to see waves of Covid wash across countries. Throwing humans at "dull" problems is no longer an option; no matter if those humans are onshore or offshore, the risk to businesses to have critical processes in the hands of disengaged or ill employees is too significant to continue with the status quo.

So, where does that leave us? With a Digital Workforce. Computers do not get bored. Computers do not get sick (if adequately secured). A computer will not resign for a more fulfilling job. If deployed correctly, a business will increase its ability to continue operating no matter what is happening in the world, and will be able to raise the morale of the employees, who will have much more fulfilling jobs. While it may initially be a bit more costly to onboard a Digital Worker (depending on the process to automate), the ongoing savings will more than makeup for the initial cost outlay.

We were recently kicking off a Digital Workforce onboarding with a large Mortgage Servicing company. In the middle of the discussion, completely unprompted, one of the customer process managers shouted out "WOO HOO" when she learned that the new worker would be onboard within weeks. This painful manual process that they had suffered with for years was finally going to be fully automated.

WOO HOO indeed.