Like other AI-powered business tools, AI assistants are rapidly gaining popularity. Due to their ability to increase productivity and optimize workflows in HR, sales, IT, and other departments, some organizations are already starting to see the benefits. In one study, customer support agents who had help from AI increased productivity by nearly 14%.
If artificial intelligence is changing the future of work, consider an AI assistant your guide to help you stay ahead of the competition. Read on to find out more about what AI assistants are, some actual use cases, how they work, their benefits, and more.
What is an AI assistant?
You’re probably already familiar with virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri. Sixty percent of U.S. consumers use voice assistants and smart home devices like these every day to set reminders, order groceries, and even answer the door.
An AI assistant is a conversational AI interface that uses large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP), generative AI, and machine learning algorithms to perform various tasks.
The reason AI assistants are so helpful — particularly for enterprises — is that they’re collaborative. These digital assistants act as partners to enhance productivity by automating many complex tasks.
Plus, unlike simpler automation tools, many of which can only answer questions, more sophisticated AI assistants can engage with users through natural, conversational language, understanding text and voice commands and responding with immediate answers and seamless task execution.
How do AI assistants work?
AI assistants use a combination of NLP, LLMs, generative AI, and ML to understand, interpret, and respond to user commands.
How do they do this?
- Large Language Models (LLMs): LLMs enable AI assistants to generate human-like text based on vast datasets, enhancing natural and contextually accurate dialogue; for example, GPT-3.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP): Allows AI assistants to understand and respond to human language
- Generative AI: Enables AI assistants to create real-time, original content such as text, images, and audio, enhancing response variability and creativity.
- Machine Learning (ML): Enables AI assistants to learn from data, identify patterns, and personalize responses, improving overtime based on user interaction history.
Using NLP and LLMs, AI assistants process human speech and text data to understand context and interpret user intent. Generative AI enables them to produce human-like responses, and ML algorithms allow them to learn from every user interaction and self-improve performance and accuracy over time.
AI assistants can also integrate with your enterprise’s existing systems and services to streamline daily workflows,
AI assistants vs. chatbots
AI assistants and chatbots interact with users through conversational interfaces, providing instant responses, automating tasks, and enabling self-service capabilities. However, they differ significantly in their main focus, capabilities, adaptability, and autonomy.
AI assistants use advanced AI-powered models, including natural language processing (NLP), to provide a broader range of assistance. They act as personal or virtual helpers that understand user intent and adapt to preferences over time. In contrast, chatbots also use advanced AI, but they are primarily designed for specific, task-oriented conversations. They are often used for customer service, answering FAQs, or guiding users through simple processes.
Capabilities
Chatbots are mostly built for specific, task-oriented conversations. They are often used for customer service, answering frequently asked questions (FAQs), or guiding users through simple processes.
More advanced chatbots powered by natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML), such as those using large language models (LLMs), possess a higher degree of contextual understanding, allowing them to engage in more meaningful and coherent interactions.
However, compared to chatbots, AI assistants can handle a broader range of tasks and are more capable of human-like interactions due to their deeper contextual understanding. Because they are over integrated into enterprise systems and can using NLP to understand context, interpret user intent, and process complex requests, AI assistants are more versatile and adaptable in providing comprehensive assistance relative to chatbots.
Adaptability
Thanks to sophisticated machine learning (ML) algorithms, AI assistants can learn from user interactions and discover patterns to self-improve performance and accuracy over time.
In comparison, basic chatbots have more limited functionality. They typically follow simple, rule-based systems, recognizing patterns and generating pre-determined, prescriptive responses.
Autonomy
Rule-based chatbots' limited contextual understanding means they can only answer simple queries, and they lack systems integration and true capabilities to take independent actions. For example, while an AI assistant can fully automate IT support, a basic chatbot is typically limited to responding to pre-determined FAQs and simple queries.
While sSome AI chatbots go further, they lack the advanced capabilities of AI assistants that can take on a wide range of tasks, from managing schedules and setting reminders to resolving IT issues and handling HR requests.
Examples of AI assistants in the real world
While AI assistants are relatively new technology, they’re already transforming workflows in the office and how we interact with our homes. Here are a few examples of how AI assistants level up routines in the real world.
Personal AI assistants at home
Millions of people around the world use personal AI assistants like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Assistant to create shopping lists, get important reminders, and even manage smart home automations.
With just a few taps in a mobile app, you can program your AI assistant to automatically turn on the lights, start the coffee pot, and read you the latest news with a simple “Good morning” prompt. Integrate it with your smart thermostat, and it can even maintain the perfect temperature 24/7.
On your computer, tools like ChatGPTGoogle’s Gemini help you write emails, manage your calendar, and turn long, dry documents into succinct summaries. And it’s only the beginning — rapid AI advancements will make these solutions even more powerful and effective over the coming years.
AI assistants in the workplace
AI assistants are quickly gaining popularity in the workplace, especially at the enterprise level.
What makes AI assistants so valuable to enterprises? Unlike employees who clock in and out, AI assistants provide 24/7 support in multiple languages across HR, IT, and other departments.
- Focus: AI assistants enable teams to concentrate on more strategic, higher-value work by automating repetitive and mundane tasks.
- Capabilities: They are equipped to handle various functions, from processing HR inquiries to troubleshooting IT issues, ensuring seamless operations across multiple departments.
- Adaptability: AI assistants can easily adjust to different languages, processes, and systems, making them highly versatile in diverse enterprise environments.
- Autonomy: They operate independently, offering consistent and reliable service without constant human supervision, thus enhancing overall efficiency and productivity.
For example, Moveworks AI Assistant can increase team productivity across all departments. It gives employees one intuitive interface to find information spread across databases and automates tasks organization-wide, from HR and finance to IT, sales, and engineering.
Workplace AI assistants can support employees across industries, including:
- Healthcare: AI assistants help patients and providers by streamlining appointment scheduling, answering basic medical queries, and creating curated treatment plans.
- Banking: With AI assistants, banks can respond to customers’ inquiries in real time, 24/7. Since Bank of America deployed its AI assistant in 2018, the tool has helped over 42 million clients via 2+ billion interactions.
- Retail: AI assistants can anticipate customer needs, respond to questions, and provide personalized recommendations, often leading to increased sales. With an AI assistant, beauty retailer Sephora increased e-commerce net sales fourfold in six years.
Benefits of AI assistants and chatbots
From HR and sales to IT and engineering, every department in your enterprise can realize the comprehensive benefits of AI assistants.
1. Increased productivity
Focus: AI assistants significantly enhance productivity by automating routine tasks, such as scheduling meetings, answering emails, performing data entry, and generating reports. This allows employees to focus on more strategic, creative, and high-value work.
Capabilities: McKinsey reports that AI has the potential to automate work activities that currently consume 60–70% of employees’ time. Furthermore, AI assistants can optimize workflows by identifying bottlenecks, efficiently prioritizing tasks, and allocating resources.
Insights-driven decisions: AI assistants deliver real-time insights and recommendations by analyzing vast amounts of data, enabling employees to make more informed decisions quickly.
2. Enhanced employee experience
Adaptability: AI assistants improve day-to-day workflows by offering on-demand, around-the-clock support for IT issues, HR queries, or workplace policy questions, leading to faster responses and reduced downtime.
Personalized experiences: Far from offering scripted responses, AI assistants adapt to each employee's needs by providing customized recommendations, training, and support.
Self-service empowerment: AI assistants enhance autonomy by enabling employees to search through organizational knowledge bases quickly. This facilitates problem-solving wherever and whenever it’s needed.
3. Greater efficiency
Resource optimization: By analyzing usage trends and system demands, AI assistants can identify areas of underutilization or overutilization and take immediate action or offer recommendations to optimize resource allocation. This minimizes waste, delivers cost savings, and boosts productivity.
Minimizing errors: Automated routine tasks help reduce human errors, allowing employees to devote more time to high-value activities.
Focus on meaningful work: By taking over mundane, repetitive tasks, AI assistants drive greater efficiency and help employees find more meaning and satisfaction in their work. According to a recent Microsoft survey:
- 90% of users said AI saves them time.
- 85% said AI enables them to focus on more important work.
- 84% reported that AI allows them to be more creative.
- 83% feel they enjoy their work more when using AI.
In these ways, AI assistants can be invaluable assets across various departments in an enterprise. They enhance focus, demonstrate powerful capabilities, adapt to individual needs, and foster autonomy while increasing overall efficiency.
How AI assistants can automate essential business workflows
In addition to improving individual user experiences, AI assistants also empower enterprises by automating essential business workflows to accelerate sales, simplify onboarding, and more.
Accelerate sales
Successfully leading prospects through the sales funnel can be a long, complex journey, but AI assistants can automate this essential workflow to help sales teams work more efficiently and close more deals.
When an AI assistant is integrated with your enterprise’s CRM systems, your sales team can use natural language queries to automate the research process and quickly retrieve customer account details and opportunity information.from various sources, even summarizing long financial documents like 10-K reports.
Beyond saving a lot of time, this automated retrieval ensures sales reps have accurate, up-to-date information before interacting with leads.
AI assistants can create summaries from meeting notes and automate email drafting, enabling users to quickly generate email drafts by pulling relevant content from tools like Salesforce and recent interactions. This automation saves sales teams from wasting time and effort combing through large bodies of text. Plus, it ensures reps don’t overlook small but critical details when preparing for client interactions.
Additionally, AI assistants with agentic AI can track the progress of deals in real time to provide sales reps with live updates and suggestions on next steps to help them close deals faster. In fact, when Microsoft began using an AI assistant to give its sales team insights into customer needs and suggest actions, customer interaction time and lead conversions increased by 40%.
Simplify new employee onboarding
Onboarding new employees requires a lot of back-and-forth paperwork, eating into everyone’s time. AI assistants can dramatically simplify new employee onboarding activities to help both newcomers and HR teams spend less time sifting through paperwork.
First, AI assistants can streamline HR workflows by automatically sharing onboarding documents, like company policies, PTO information, and direct deposit paperwork. New employees can also turn to AI assistants 24/7 for instant help with onboarding questions instead of waiting for replies from busy HR professionals.
With AI assistants taking over the busywork portion of onboarding, new employees can get up to speed faster, and HR professionals can dedicate more time to human-centric activities that integrate newcomers with the company culture.
Support employee development
After onboarding, AI assistants continue to play a role in streamlining HR workflows via employee development. For instance, they can create tailored learning paths based on employees’ specific tasks, roles, skills, and learning styles.
When integrated with your knowledge base, AI assistants can also instantly surface and summarize key insights from training materials to answer employees’ questions. They can even suggest relevant training courses for them.
For HR professionals, support from AI assistants enables them to optimize their workflows and automate administrative tasks like performance report generation, so they can focus on 1:1 human interactions and strategic initiatives.
Automate IT support
In a survey of IT decision-makers and knowledge workers, 95% said IT issues disrupt their productivity. This is another area where AI assistants can help eliminate bottlenecks and streamline workflows to boost productivity.
Specifically, AI assistants can optimize IT support by automating service desk tasks, such as password resets and ticket triaging. This accelerates response times and issue resolution and frees up IT teams for more critical and value-adding activities.
AI assistants can further streamline IT support workflows by enabling self-service. This gives employees instant access to the relevant information they need to solve issues independently. Again, this reduces reliance on IT teams and removes bottlenecks for smoother IT operations.
AI assistants can also undertake more advanced AI tasks, such as:
Proactive service desk: Manual workflows can lead to inefficiencies and delays. AI assistants can transform your service desk to be proactive, enable employees to self-serve, resolve frequent problems, provide proactive ticket status updates, and effectively manage incoming tickets.
and allowing IT teams to prioritize strategic tasks..Secure your processes: Improve the security of your processes with a digital assistant, to help streamline communications, mitigate alert overload, and keep track of critical information for timely actions. It supports vendor security assessments, delivers clear outage notifications, monitors login activities, and manages incident response tickets.
Streamline project management
AI assistants are invaluable when it comes to streamlining project management workflows. For one, they can automate the task of scheduling meetings by analyzing participants’ calendars, suggesting optimal time slots, and sending invitations to quickly secure meeting times with minimal scheduling conflicts.
They can also help individuals stay on track by organizing to-do lists, sending reminders about upcoming deadlines, and keeping them informed about task statuses.
When integrated with your project management system, AI assistants can even proactively mark tasks as complete based on user inputs and preset conditions, taking administrative tasks off employees’ plates while still keeping them organized.
Agentic AI assistants take independent actions
Some AI assistants leverage agentic AI to perform tasks and make decisions autonomously. Agentic AI enables goal-directed behavior and the ability to set and pursue goals autonomously.
In other words, agentic AI solutions can understand users’ needs and preferences through contextual data analysis. This allows them to handle multiple responsibilities simultaneously and perform diverse functions to execute complex, multi-step actions.
For example, an agentic AI assistant can independently arrange a meeting by checking participants’ availability, booking a conference room, and sending out email invitations — all without requiring any human intervention.
Agentic AI solutions can also enhance productivity by taking over routine and time-consuming tasks, allowing users to focus on more strategic activities. Additionally, they can adapt to changing circumstances in real-time, providing more responsive and efficient service while improving over time with continuous learning capabilities.
Moveworks AI Assistant supercharges how enterprises work
AI assistants rapidly expanding use cases are helping enterprises to increase productivity and optimize workflows across every department.
Moveworks AI assistants can accelerate sales, automate IT support, streamline project management, and optimize HR processes to enhance employee experiences and create new efficiency gains throughout the enterprise.
Top benefits of Moveworks AI Assistant:
- Unmatched IT support automation: Moveworks delivers instant IT support by helping to resolve employees’ issues autonomously, reducing the workload on IT teams and improving response times.
- Enhanced employee experience: Employees can talk with Moveworks in the messaging apps they use today, interact with employees conversationally, making it easier for them to get the help they need without navigating complex systems.
- Streamlined workflow integration: By integrating seamlessly with existing enterprise systems and tools, Moveworks enables smooth operation and communication across different departments, maximizing efficiency and productivity.
If your business isn’t capitalizing on the numerous capabilities of an AI assistant, then your employees are already missing out on the transformative productivity benefits of AI.
Don’t miss out — see how AI agents are powering the future of work at Moveworks.global, our annual AI conference.
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