What is the impact of artificial intelligence on workplace productivity?

The UK productivity crisis is a growing concern for enterprises across Britain. Sometimes referred to as 'the lost decade', productivity has alarmingly declined over the last 10 years. At the same time, however, artificial intelligence (AI) has crept to the surface of enterprises, but where do AI and productivity meet in the middle? What is the overall effect of AI on employee productivity?

Casting a net wider than that of the UK, AI may have a positive effect on productivity worldwide.

AI's productivity promises

AI introduces a predictive element to day-to-day business. In particular, organisations in, manufacturing can zero in on predictive maintenance for a more proactive approach. Predictive maintenance enables businesses to cut out scheduled services. Instead, AI will monitor and analyse equipment to issue alerts when a service is necessary. In turn, downtime and overall maintenance costs are kept to a minimum.

Furthermore, AI can also be used in recruitment to pre-screen job candidates before inviting them in for an interview. Reading through stacks of CVs is a notoriously time-consuming task for HR, but fortunately, AI-driven tools exist to alleviate this burden, while helping to eliminate unconscious bias in the recruitment process. Examples of such tools available today include recruitment chatbots and virtual assistants. At the very least, chatbots are able to respond to applications so as to not leave applicants 'hanging'. Not only that, but AI can assess a candidate's speech and expressions to determine their suitability for the role. As a result, HR are freer to work on less repetitive tasks.

AI can also boost productivity in the realms of cybersecurity. In particular, AI provides an always-on solution to protect your business from the worst. This way, your cybersecurity teams can clock out for the day knowing that AI is ticking away in the meantime. More specifically, AI can monitor performance to identify and fix threats, thus freeing your cybersecurity team to focus on higher value tasks.

Thus, an ongoing theme of automation is evident, demonstrating how AI can repurpose how your workforce spends their time. With so many years behind us of lagging productivity, AI is proving to be the only way to usher productivity into tomorrow's workplace.

Why not check out our CxO of the Week, C Vijayakumar at HCL Technologies?