How COVID-19 will change enterprise technology for the better

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of many leading technologies, and not only for those with direct connection to mitigating the virus. Long an amorphous buzzword, digital transformation has taken shape  recently, with many industry luminaries noting that projects expected to take years have suddenly been implemented in months.

Although not every advanced technology initiative is accelerating, the ones that drive business value are. Work is never returning to the way it once was, and businesses that have embraced new technologies are adapting faster to this new environment. As part of this adaptation, a significant number of companies have said their employees will continue to have the option of working remotely even after the pandemic subsides.

As part of my role at ServiceNow, I speak frequently with chief information officers across many industries. Their issues and insights help to inform my views. With that in mind and at the midpoint of a very unusual year, I decided to reflect on accelerating trends in the enterprise workplace.

An increasingly dispersed and hybrid workforce is a key contributing factor to these changes. I expect these trends to come to pass by 2025, some of them much sooner, and all of them leading to greater connectivity, speed and productivity. 

Enterprise chatbots and virtual assistants will become ubiquitous

Personal digital voice assistants have become increasingly common for individual consumers. What is far less common today is similar functionality in the enterprise workplace. This is rapidly changing.

Across many industries, organizations are using virtual assistants to augment human centric operations. In fact, we have seen a 360% increase in virtual agent conversations since March. Growing sophistication of the virtual assistants will make their communication so effective that human involvement will no longer be required for an increasing number of workflows. From onboarding employees to managing physical spaces for social distancing, artificial intelligence-powered chatbots will give employees their very own personal digital assistant to help with routine tasks. In the future we will wonder how we ever worked without them.

More than administration, entire departments will rely on these capabilities as part of their larger digital transformation strategies. For example, AI-powered customer service operations will leverage virtual agents to provide proactive service to customers, solve problems at record speed, and analyze data to produce insights to improve the customer experience. 

Even after the pandemic threat diminishes, commuting to the office every day will be history — though in truth, for a time some meetings might still be best held in-person. An important sales meeting with a current or potential customer, the kickoff of a new project or an annual employee performance review are good examples.

Chatbots will orchestrate workflows in the background and notify us when we need to get involved. Our enterprise AI assistants will analyze calendars and make recommendations on which days in any given month employees should be in the office for in-person collaboration. They can go beyond that to automate the provisioning of meetings by ensuring any needed supplies are ordered from support staff including catering as needed.

Augmented reality will facilitate digital collaboration

Leveraging technologies such as AR for whiteboard capabilities or closed captioning tools will make our digital work style today look like the dark ages. These technologies will resolve the divide between an office worker and home worker. With many of us working remotely now, there is an even playing field, but when hybrid models become the norm, the traditional divide will return. However, AR will effectively bridge the divide.

We are already seeing early uses of augmented reality appear in multiple areas, from field service to medical applications, such as projecting images onto the retina of a surgeon. Over the next several years, haptics and robotics will allow us to get closer to a point of using mixed reality on a more wide-scale level, wherein we will not only view a virtual environment but interact with it.

Now that we are getting used to videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom for effective videoconferencing, advanced collaboration technologies, such as holograms, will soon follow, for both in-office and remote workers. This will advance along with computing power and networking speed. Emerging 5G networks will be a fundamental enabler, especially for the remote worker. Business travel will be significantly reduced, cutting costs and boosting the bottom line.

The idea of ubiquitous computing in which digital intelligence is everywhere yet blends seamlessly into the background has been a driving industry vision for years. Digital technologies are now getting to the point where this vision will soon be reached. Also referred to as “ambient computing” or “ambient intelligence,” computing where devices and systems are integrated across application and platform boundaries will be commonplace.

Humanity is creating a vast intelligent network where technology gains the ability to sense, predict and respond to our needs. This applies equally to recommendations for restaurants, annual sales projections and enabling remote “face-to-face” meetings. AI will be embedded into most aspects of our personal in a seamless and unobtrusive manner.

Putting it all together

In this new world of work, connecting technologies and crossing the boundaries necessary to provide seamless, transparent and persistent experiences with context will take time to realize. Businesses that provide their employees with the right digital experiences will see increased engagement, higher productivity and better business continuity. COVID-19 has accelerated this development across a spectrum of technologies.

For all of the devastation and loss caused by the pandemic, there are silver linings for technologists. We’re not going to have to wait to experiment with exciting new technologies and projects that might have taken one year will be completed in six months or less. Digital transformation is real, and it’s happening before our very eyes.

Chris Bedi is chief information officer of ServiceNow Inc. He wrote this for SiliconANGLE.   

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