If COVID-19 has taught the world one thing, it is that the only certainty in life is that nothing is certain. As the pandemic gripped the planet for almost two years, workers used the global slowdown and shifting dynamics to take stock of their careers, assessing what, with all this newfound unpredictability, they really wanted from their jobs.

It has become starkly apparent that mundane, repetitive tasks, “working like a machine”, in other words, are no longer of interest to employees. In many cases, this has resulted in the Great Resignation, impacting companies of all sizes across the world. Today’s workers yearn for roles that have purpose and meaning, which stimulates and makes them pleased to come to the office each day.

Businesses that solve this challenge can benefit significantly. Happy workers don’t just bring improved well-being and reduce staff turnover; they boost the business’s bottom line. In fact, according to researchers at the University of Oxford, workers were found to be 13 per cent more productive when happy.

Forward-thinking businesses need to invest in technology and digital tools to make their staff empowered, productive and successful at work. And the name of the secret sauce? Intelligent Automation.

Using AI-powered automation will improve an employee’s satisfaction in the workplace by automating repetitive, low-value tasks. It frees up employees to focus on other, more appealing and engaging undertakings that draw on their core competencies and human creativity.

And by making it easier to optimise employees’ working hours and focus on higher-value tasks, companies save time and money. But increased productivity isn’t the only gain. The technology can deliver broader operational efficiencies, faster and more data-driven business decisions, and smooth the way to successful scaling.

Let’s look into how Intelligent Automation can elevate core business processes.

Streamlining expense management and human resources functions

As we’ve discussed, Intelligent Automation can play a critical role in helping employees find meaning in their work by removing the humdrum aspect of their daily tasks, raising their satisfaction in the workplace and making them less likely to leave.

Areas within the workplace primed for AI-powered solutions include expense management, the second most controllable budget in a company after wages, and human resources. These are departments where data capture and analysis, accuracy, and the need for repetition are implicit.

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Manual data input and tracking are incredibly fiddly and prone to simple human errors from incorrect keystrokes or placing numbers in the wrong field on a spreadsheet, especially when vast troves of information are involved.

The automation of expense management prevents mistakes in the compilation and computing of data and dismisses the need for time-consuming manual intervention to rectify computational errors.

Intelligent Automation can also track expenses to identify anomalies in expenses and flag potential fraud, either intentional or unintentional, or abuse of company policies that control and monitor expenses.

As an environmental plus, Intelligent Automation can streamline expenses by forgoing paperwork and its manual submission, by taking photos of receipts that can be directly loaded onto an app for immediate reimbursement, for instance, improving efficiency and cutting time and cost for employees and employers.

Ultimately, when expense management processes flow smoothly, business managers gain accurate insights into their organisation’s financial health, helping them identify cost-saving opportunities and potential risks.

Intelligent Automation brings similarly far-reaching benefits to human resources. The data collected by AI can be instrumental in analysis, prediction, and diagnosis that let human resources teams make better decisions, from recruitment of new hires all the way through an employee’s life cycle.

For instance, onboarding is a critical yet time-consuming step where an inefficient, poorly organised process can impact the long-term retention of fresh talent. New recruits often have many questions that can be answered more quickly and accurately by an AI-powered human resources solution than a human worker doing the task manually.

Human resources can integrate Intelligent Automation to harness multiple data points on an employee to proactively see if they are due for a salary increase based on performance and market rates.

It can also determine if staff have attained the necessary skills for a promotion, are on track to meet that month’s targets, or are likely to seek employment elsewhere due to unhappiness in the workplace.

Conventional methods of discovering these by HR are far from scientific, and riddled with gaps in information, often resulting in ill-informed or contentious outcomes.

The beauty of AI-powered automation is that what might take months of flawed investigation and deduction can be done in minutes and with a result that is clear, objective, accurate, and grounded in facts. And nobody can argue with that.

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