Are chatbots liberating workers?

If you need to do a job more than once then automate it – or so the wisdom goes. And now the growing availability of intelligent, automated software – or bots – is making automation a reality for businesses of all sizes.

Bots are now undertaking much of the drudgery of business life – filling in forms, answering customer queries, compiling data and handling social media tasks. Proponents say this liberates staff to work on more creative and engaging work; bots are a new, cheap resource to be exploited. But is there a human cost and just how much should we expect from these new minion workers?

Automation frightens some people who fear their jobs will be taken away by robots that can perform their roles more efficiently and cheaply. But others, such as Nika Carvalho, office manager at London-based technology agency Kwamecorp, feel differently. Kwamecorp creates apps and software for its blue-chip clientele and Carvalho was in charge of ensuring that everyone’s timesheets made it to the accounts department, so the company could calculate its billable hours.

But this was time-consuming, repetitive and risked placing her at odds with colleagues (when she had to chase them for their timesheets). So the company developed the Nikabot, which can be downloaded for free from the Slack directory (an app store where Slack users can install tools – such as Twitter or Google Drive – that integrate with the software). It then resides on each user’s contacts list and does the timesheets admin work.

“This was a small part of my job, but it makes my life much easier,” Carvalho says. “I’m no longer always requesting my colleagues’ timesheets and asking the same questions. I didn’t feel threatened by it. It was like I was given an assistant to help me.”

The Nikabot sends staff a message at 10am every day, asking which projects they worked on the day before. This information is then gathered centrally and the accounts team can use it to process invoices. If a staff member fails to respond, the Nikabot sends reminders. “Before, we used to collect the information weekly or quarterly, so now it is much easier to make sure it is accurate,” Carvalho says.

Company founder Ravi Lal made Nikabot available on the Slack directory so other businesses could use it and provide feedback. He says it has been downloaded by 4,000 other businesses and believes that the vast majority are SMEs.

The Nikabot is still in its infancy but could be developed in a number of ways. “We wanted to create an all-round office manager but decided to focus on this area to begin with. Potentially, bots could be used to handle expenses, send invoices, book staff holidays and more,” says Lal.

Data intensive companies are also considering using bots. Ross Tavendale, head of media at digital and marketing studio Ideas Made Digital, says his business is constantly on the look-out for ways to add automation. “If you do any repeatable task, automate it,” he says.

The business is a regular user of project management and chat tool Slack and employee rewards platform Bonusly. It also takes advantage of the many digital recipes that are found on the IFTT.com platform, which can, for example, queue up and send out images posted to a Tumblr blog as tweets. But for Ideas Made Digital, bots are most helpful when it comes to auditing clients’ websites.

Ideas Made Digital’s marketing team uses Bots on a daily basis. “We use the bots to automate the processing and data collection part of our job to free us up for problem solving and creative tasks,” says Tavendale. Ideas Made Digital uses a range of bots and analytics tools such as the website crawler Screaming Frog, influence measurement tool Pitchbox and SEO tool SEMrush.

Tavendale estimates that such tools reduce the amount of time needed to prepare a website report by at least 80% compared with a manual audit. “They’ve helped our business become streamlined and efficient. If it can be done by a robot, then it should be. Humans should be used for creativity and problem solving, not processing data.”

Rapid change in the workplace will continue and usually the best approach is to embrace it while also remaining pragmatic. Daniel Winterstein is director at software company SoDash and bots maker SoGrow and also has a PhD in artificial intelligence (AI) from the University of Edinburgh. He says AI-powered bots can have a positive impact on the workplace but also points to some high-profile disasters such as Microsoft’s Tay – a Twitter account chatbot that was designed to learn conversational skills from others’ tweets, which led to its tweets becoming racist and sexist.

Winterstein expects automation to have a big influence over the next five years. “I expect automation to impact many industries, starting with those jobs where there are many repetitive tasks being performed (drudge work). Our focus is on customer service and marketing. That has plenty of repetitive tasks well suited to automation. Transport will also be changed. In time, even professional areas like law and medicine.”

“My own profession, software engineer, will also be affected,” he adds. “The bot builders will put themselves out of work. In five years’ time, normal school kids will be making their own bots.”

SoGrow has a small business offering, a bot that boosts the presence of companies on social networks such as Twitter for £19 per month. Winterstein says it is for entrepreneurs that do not have much time but want to be active on social media. The bot just needs to know a few things about you and will then search Twitter for the right connections. “You answer some questions and it will go away and find the kind of people you want to attract and the kinds of conversations you want to be involved in,” he says.

Winterstein says he spends a lot of his time educating businesses on what bots can and can’t do and says there is a still a significant gap between reality and expectations. While AI is evolving, it seems to have some way to go. “People aren’t really sure what bots are and what they are capable of. Some people expect far too much and for a bot to be like a human, which it can’t. Part of our job is to frame the problems and show how the bot can solve them.”

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