Albert Einstein once famously said: “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
This statement is never truer than when it comes to coping with changes in the way we humans interact with software, so much so that we have started to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to do so. It seems that Einstein was bang on the money with his predictions.
But why do we need AI to cope with a few changes in workflow? Take Salesforce for example, there are a plethora of its CRM add-ons that can change the way in which the CRM presents its data to us – isn’t it just a matter of common sense for operators to deal with these changes when they come their way? Maybe – but when an organization has several hundred employees all slowing down their workflow because they’re struggling to cope with updates to a system, that means higher costs effectively; after all – time is money.
A wolf in sheep’s clothing
AI has come to the rescue in the form of a hyper-personalized TutorBot known as adigital adoption platform – or DAP. A DAP is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as it seemingly presents a very simple way of helping human device operators to adopt new workflows and adapt to changes due to updates or the installation of new software packages. But although simple on the outside, under the hood it’s fiendishly complex.
The DAP is a secondary ‘teaching layer’ of software that runs in conjunction with the primary platform in use, which could well be SAP or Salesforce. It can be installed ‘in the cloud’ in the case of Software as a Service (SaaS) packages and also across an organization’s on-premise servers – even onto a single stand-alone machine.
Readers of a certain age might remember Microsoft’s hyper-annoying ‘paperclip’ helper – a supposedly cute avatar with a paperclip body, known as Clippy, that used to pop up every time you tried to do anything on a PC – “It looks like you’re trying to write a letter, do you need help with formatting?” No, because you had already thrown your laptop through the window in frustration at its constant appearance. It even took several attempts to turn it off despite hitting the ‘don’t show again’ checkbox every time!
The dreaded Windows 97 Clippy
But the DAP is way smarter than Clippy. As it uses AI-powered hyper-personalization, the DAP only offers help when the operator has made the same mistake more than a couple of times, but as the person learns – so the DAP stops offering assistance where the user has clearly learned the correct procedure.
For example, imagine Mary, an employee of Acme Manufacturing, has been using Salesforce CRM for over a year to input daily figures into her workstation. Suddenly, management brings in a new facility which changes the workflow, the order of screens and content, so Mary has to re-learn the software as if it were her first day at work again. To make matters worse, Mary works from home (WFH), so there’s no-one handy to ask without having to make several telephone calls to her colleagues. It’s all very time consuming. Mary starts off by inputting the number of Acme widgets that were sold yesterday, only to find that the system won’t accept her figures. She’s baffled. The DAP running alongside the CRM recognizes the problem and wakes up to help Mary.
‘Mary, the number of widgets sold must now be expressed as boxed units, so if 20 widgets were ordered, and only 10 shipped, the figure entered into the shipping field is 1, because widgets are packed in boxes of 10…’
ChatBots vs TutorBots
Mary understands this and alters her figures accordingly. But let’s say the next morning she hasn’t slept well and is tired and makes the same mistake again. The DAP will note that Mary needs assistance once more and will offer it proactively. However, after three or four more days, every time Mary enters her figures correctly, the DAP will make a note in its AI brain that Mary has mastered the widget fields. In this way, the DAP can offer differing assistance at various levels for each and every employee on a one-to-one basis. Suddenly, even WFH employees are becoming efficient and productive within a short time of any UX changes being incepted by head office.
Wrapping up
But every smart new technology has something smarter on its tail. The advent of OpenAI’s new ChatGTP, the current darling of social media, is proving itself to be super smart and may well supersede its simpler counterpart of the DAP. GTP isanswering complex questions currently and impressing all who use it – but perhaps a lot of this is novelty value. A DAP is focused only on one task, to work with software packages for which it’s programmed, and its answers are guaranteed to be correct – it’s like the difference between sitting in your living room, asking Amazon Alexa when the next train from Chicago to New York is leaving, rather than standing on the platform at Union Station and asking the train driver!
But a DAP integrated with GTP, TutorBot and Chatbot in perfect harmony. Now you’d be talking. Quite literally…
