We Spoke with Silicon Valley’s Constellation Research VP Alan Lepofsky on AI and the Future of the Workplace:
We’ve been working on improving Hibox to be the ultimate digital workplace this year. We’ve been focusing our research and brainstorming on the future of collaboration, AI, and productivity in the workplace. This post is the first in a series in which we’ll be speaking to some of our favorite experts and get their thoughts on these topics. We’d love to share them with you here.
I just had the pleasure of speaking with Alan Lepofsky, Vice President and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley’s Constellation Research, this morning. Earlier this year, Alan featured Hibox on Constellation’s Group Messaging Short List alongside Slack and Hipchat. We reached out to him to get his thoughts on Artificial Intelligence in the workplace throughout the next few years.
Alan gave us a look at some of the positives as well as potential complications in the future surrounding the introduction of AI to our work lives.
Alan predicts that what “we’re going to start to see 1, 3, 5 years from now is a little more intelligence, a little bit more of these tools knowing our preferences for the people, the objects, the brands we want to interact with, and the way we would respond to things with a little more sentiment behind them. And the reason that’s going to take a little while is it takes data for those things to happen.”
AI will change the day-to-day work of professions across the board. Alan sees huge advantages for employees in sales and marketing roles particularly, whose workdays include both technical and creative work.
“If you’re a sales professional, if these tools start to build you more intelligent, more accurate, more contextual lead generation funnels, then you don’t have to spend as much time on wasted opportunities.”
In terms of some potential hesitation, Alan questioned how much we will allow AI access to our personal data such as health records, location, actions online, etc. Considering we’ve already experienced errors from AI, it will be interesting to see how these technologies improve and whether our level of trust does as well.
Alan sees AI getting employees off the hook for the majority of menial tasks that take up most time spent in the office today over the next five years.
Hibox is on a mission to make this reality as soon as possible with brand new AI features ready to roll out in the near future and make the work smoother.
Already, Hibox can detect when messages you send were likely meant to be tasks and will proactively suggest that you convert that message into a task you can assign and track. With this feature you don’t have to depend on people remembering to get the little things done – there is a trackable task with notifications to make sure everything gets finished on time. Hibox can also help you delegate work more effectively by automatically suggesting which user is the best to assign a particular task to based on skills and workload, saving you time as a manager and making sure the best possible person is on the job.
We are already testing tons of other new AI features like automatically scheduling meetings, employee sentiment analysis and predictive messaging. We’ll be rolling out as soon as possible to help get the workplace a little closer to Alan’s vision! Stay tuned.
For a complete digital workspace with team chat, tasks, and video calling plus productivity-boosting AI, try Hibox free today.
