Date Published March 9, 2017 - Last Updated December 6, 2017
If you have any kind of social media newsfeed that involves IT or service management or customer service, you’ve been seeing lots of posts about chatbots, artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive systems, and machine learning. Some of the stories and posts are a bit depressing: How many jobs will be taken over by bots or some other form of automation, or how you’ll be dealing with a bot for customer service—or maybe even legal advice—in the near future.
Given that we are on the high side of the hype cycle about all forms of automation, this was a natural discussion for the Twitter chat. Who is really doing it, and what are they doing?
A couple of the participants mentioned that their organizations are doing RPA, which is robotic process automation. In fact, we know (from some very recent research) that process automation is happening on a much larger scale than the introduction of chatbots or AI.
One participant gave a reason to automate: Increasing complexity in his vertical. Humans are getting assistance from automated processes where:
- The processes are simple and repetitive
- The data involved in the process is very complex and requires rapid analysis
From tax law to setting up new accounts, automation is finding its role in IT. Have you automated any processes?
Read through the conversation for some insightful tips, and continue the conversation on HDIConnect.
Join us again this Friday, for our next #HDIchat!
Roy Atkinson is HDI's senior writer/analyst, acting as in-house subject matter expert and chief writer for SupportWorld articles and white papers. In addition to being a member of the HDI International Certification Standards Committee and the HDI Desktop Support Advisory Board, Roy is a popular speaker at HDI conferences and is well known to HDI local chapter audiences. His background is in both service desk and desktop support as well as small-business consulting. Roy is highly rated on social media, especially on the topics of IT service management and customer service. He is a cohost of the very popular #custserv (customer service) chat on Twitter, which celebrated its fifth anniversary on December 9, 2014. He holds a master’s certificate in advanced management strategy from Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business, and he is a certified HDI Support Center Manager. Follow him on Twitter @HDI_Analyst and @RoyAtkinson.