Empowering workers is a vital task for successful entrepreneurs. As efficient leaders, the tools they provide can help shape the culture and practices that best fit an enterprise’s business strategy. As a result, positive encouragement can lead to greater teamwork and innovations in the workplace.
But in an era where 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional with increases in productivity at a 30-year low, work teams and environments are in need of improved systems that can assist in creating more collaborative and creative business projects and solutions.
As advanced technologies evolve exponentially, AI is becoming an innovative new tool that could help build the connections which bind strong business teams together. In fact, Accenture predicts that by 2035, AI productivity will increase up to 35%.
When utilized correctly, AI technology can help improve teamwork by allowing entrepreneurs to become more creative, efficient, and communicative with coworkers ultimately increasing customer retention and ROI. Here’s how:
Project Management
In the future, AI project management systems will perform every day management and administrative tasks without demanding human input. It will not only automate simple and redundant tasks, but help team members understand key project principles and goals.
Today, those in project assistant roles can currently focus on managing specific project niches, rather than complex or theoretical areas. For example, Harmon.ai’s Collage is an AI-based technology that assists in project management. The tool automatically finds and matches topics across many apps to help manage team knowledge and allowing teams to focus on the bigger picture when thinking about customers, projects, and products. One benefit is that AI’s natural language processing and machine learning, can extract topics and terms from cloud services like emails, documents, business apps and social networks.
Yet, the next generation of project management AI will be programmed to expand their knowledge of tasks and teammates’ work capabilities. Soon, machine learning could begin to process information that can be learned via task descriptions. In fact, Gartner predicts that in the next 5 years AI will be more important for business and project management functions than cloud or mobile tools. Soon, big data metrics will be able to assess quality, performance, learning, effort, and attempts at task resolutions.
For example, AI can track changes in coding tasks and link to the employees who performed the task. When problems are reported, the bot can identify and report the line of code with the bug, the code writer, and its related task. This will allow teams to seek out actionable solutions and better assess team and project performance.
In the next generation of AI, as data becomes more detailed, comprehensible, and organized for machine learning systems, bots will identify and fill in missing data and improve metadata. But teams must more compactly work together to upgrade their skills, identifying corrupted data. This metadata will then factor into machine learning algorithms and provide more substantial advice on how human workers can perform complex tasks.
Reshaping Work Roles and Values
Many people believe that AI will completely automate the majority of jobs. Yet, research from tech company, Atlassian, reports that 90% of companies are attempting to address problems that are so complex, they’ll still need human teams to solve rigorous dilemmas. AI will allow talent and capital to be used much more efficiently. Team members can focus on more complex, creative talents that add more value to the company, connecting personally with customers, and streamline processes. For instance, according to Accenture’s Why AI is the Future of Growth report, Praedicat is an AI start-up offering risk modeling so that casualty and property insurers more accurately underwrite risk pricing. Using big data and machine learning, the tool can read over 22 million peer-reviewed scientific research papers to monitor impending risks. This allows professionals to save time and come up with innovations and solutions as they review emerging trends and data in the market.
When it comes to capital, businesses can save money by automating production processes, in effect saving time and resources. But how does increased revenue affect teams? In addition to potentially offering higher salaries, tech can help consolidate opportunities for employees and employers. Within teams can afford more experimentation with products, more time to brainstorm minute details, and inform progressive workplace innovations.
Relationship Building
As previously mentioned, AI tools can free up time so that team members can perform more skilled tasks. It also allows workers to inquire, reflect, and test strategies in more depth.
In addition, AI can help build bridges of trust between coworkers. A current survey shows that over 78% of workers don’t fully trust their teammates, with 86% don’t fully trust new teammates to adapt to changing situations. A McKinsey report states that businesses can improve upon this by facilitating team cycles of self-reflection and action according to the Harvard Business Review.
In the area of recruitment, AI-empowered HR departments can spend less time hiring the right talent, offering smooth transitions into the digital platforms that AI provides. Indeed, this offers a deeper philosophical period of exploration on company goals and values initiated through group meetings and more time for team-building exercises. Many companies are finding that AI is part of their societal responsibility to train and prepare a new era, building cross-generational bonds in the process.
Meet your newest teammate, AI
Like the working parts of an intelligent machine, teammates need to work together to optimize functions for workplace organization. The presence of AI can streamline the adaption of digitized principles, without sacrificing emotionally intelligent human relations in the process.
As we reboot our skills for vastly different work environments, team relationships can drastically improve for the better. With more access to information, transparency, and security, our creative visions of how we organize and value our professional lives will start to shift along with the meaning of work. In a society that is assisted and uplifted markedly by robots, it stands to reason that AI could become one of the most encouraging team members — and mentors — any worker could ever have.