Revolutionizing HR With Automated Digital Assistants

The golden age of HR transformation

As automation and other emerging technologies continue to disrupt the enterprise workplace, HR is experiencing a golden age of transformation. Gartner is one of many to claim that automated digital assistants will have broader benefits to organizations – predicting more than 50 percent of medium-to-large enterprises will have deployed product chatbots by 2022.

 

AI, machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) automation are now being leveraged to not only amplify and streamline employee training programs but also to further engage those employees in their everyday work life. Digital assistants combine all three of these capabilities to deliver conversational user experiences that become more streamlined the more they are used.
 
Accenture—a $39.6 billion company with 459,000 employees in 120 countries—has been quick to jump on this trend – leveraging chatbot technology to make the required content of the Code of Business Ethics more user-friendly and actionable via a chatbot, referred to by the more human-friendly name “COBE”.
 
Commissioned by Accenture’s general counsel and chief compliance officer and created by Accenture Interactive’s design and innovation unit, Fjord, the award-winning COBE chatbot is an automated solution transforming the standard process of reviewing ethics and compliance information into an interactive, mobile-friendly experience. It, in turn, helps to properly educate employees on policies in a straightforward and engaging way, encouraging users to interact in their day to day work.
 
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The COBE chatbot not only increases employee engagement and uses technology to inform app intelligence but creates a better overall experience for users.

Fjord recognized the need to create a more user-friendly experience while educating employees about Accenture’s cultural ethics across the company. The goal was not just to create a more accessible tool, but to create an experience that employees would wantto engage with – and the results have been overwhelmingly positive.  
 
By converting Accenture’s Code of Business Ethics from the usual long-form legal document to an interactive, secure, mobile-first chatbot with built-in anonymity, Fjord designed a simplified, accessible tool that is tailored to employee needs and allows them instant access to important ethics information.
 
Following the introduction of COBE the chatbot:
 

The appeal of chatbots to modern workers lies in the technology’s ability to respond to queries in a way that seems normal to the individual: instant, intelligent and conversational digital connections are the hallmarks of modern communication. NLP is the technology that demonstrates these traits in automated communication. COBE utilizes NLP to increase interactivity with employees in a way that is natural and immersive, even for the most sensitive of topics.

After seeing such positive results from the chatbot, Accenture launched version 2 of COBE in 2018, which leveraged machine learning to allow the tool to expand its range of knowledge on ethics codes and integrate natural language processing. Based on this success, Fjord is now working to release version 3 of COBE in early 2019 – with multiple updates embedded to enable the user experience to continue to evolve, incorporating user analytics and feedback.
 
Along with continuing to update its machine learning capabilities to provide even more personalized results, new updates will include building a recommendation system for COBE to suggest the best actions for employees to take after analyzing their query. The update will also feature a bespoke chatbot content management system (CCMS) including dashboards that identify user trends and a notification system that triggers when questions surge on a particular topic, or in a specific geographic location.
 
Mobile-first interfaces, NLP, and evolving analytic tools help to identify user trends that provide more valuable feedback—and better tools—to employees over time. To create a more engaged workforce and revolutionize the state of HR overall, organizations need to lean into these innovations and ensure employees have the opportunity to utilize intelligent, scalable tools that will, in turn, transform traditionally mundane functions into interactive experiences.