“It seems like every department is off building RPA bots and other automations and I’m trying to wrap my arms around how we can sustain this growth.”
This is a statement that I frequently hear in my conversations with IT leaders. Teams across various departments are off building automation bots (a.k.a. worker bots) to help automate repetitive tasks. Paid Time Off (PTO) submission bot? Check. PO request bot? Yep, got one of those.
The intentions are right, but the issue being created is one of discovery. How can employees across the organization find these worker bots?
ServiceNow Catalog Example
When I was SVP of product at ServiceNow, one of the common complaints I heard was that their teams had built a robust service catalog, but few of their employees were able to find what they were looking for. As a result, employees would either create a generic incident request or call someone on the service desk to create the catalog request on their behalf.Clearly, service desk agents have more important things to do than to become “button pushers.”
Fast forward to 2022 and this problem has become even more pronounced as automations are now built on top of RPA tools as well as via an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) platforms – and being built outside of IT by HR, finance, and other departments.
Our Vision of Frictionless Automation
The vision at Espressive is “a world where employees receive frictionless self-help through automation.” This vision is achieved in two parts. First, ensure employees get answers to questions while maximizing the value of an organization’s knowledge management investment. Second, connect employees directly to automation resources maximizing ROI on technology investments. This is done by “connecting the human language to automation.” This means leveraging our Employee Language Cloud and NLP technology to understand what employees are looking for, and then mapping them directly to these various automation bots.
With Barista, our virtual support agent, an employee does not need to find the right bot. Instead, employees just ask Barista. Someone looking for a PTO request would never need to know about a worker bot built by the HR team. They would simply need to ask Barista something such as, “I really need some time off,” and Barista would seamlessly connect to the PTO request bot to create the employee’s request on their behalf.
It’s like magic!