The technology we use at home is slowly converging with the enterprise environment. The innovation taking place within the virtual assistant (VA) market — and its potential to create an entirely new workplace reality — is particularly exciting to see. Artificial intelligence-powered, voice-controlled assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and Cortana are already commonplace in many homes. This popularity is building pressure to integrate VA functionality into enterprise technology, as well, which could significantly reconfigure and enhance the employee experience. By 2021, Gartner, Inc. predicts that “25 percent of digital workers will use a virtual employee assistant (VEA) on a daily basis. This will be up from less than 2 percent in 2019.”*

Currently, the relationship between human and VA is predominantly a transactional one, relying on simple voice commands like “Alexa, tell me the weather forecast for this afternoon.” However, the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning that power the VA market is progressing rapidly, and in the near future, the VA will be far more than just a voice or chatbot interface. In fact, the VA is likely to become a pervasive form of intelligence across the workplace that can surface through all digital platforms and resources, including data and apps, helping individuals to accomplish their daily tasks more efficiently.

Such innovation will always trigger some concerns over the technology’s impact on people and their job security and the demand for skills. But it’s more likely that VAs will make work a better experience for everyone. Workers will always face certain limitations due to our personal capacity for work or mental processing power, for example. The VA can help people and organizations to do and achieve things they couldn’t otherwise.

Eventually, we envisage the creation of a level playing field between workers and their VA, built upon a relationship of mutual trust and collaboration, where the VA undertakes more routine tasks for the individual, allowing them to focus on delivering their best work.

Here is how we see the VA market evolving.

Acquiring “Intelligence”

The natural-language processing of voice recognition technology is growing steadily in sophistication, and eventually, conversations between an individual and their VA will be peer-to-peer, indistinguishable from human-to-human conversations.

Beyond this, the next logical step is for VA technology to have the ability to understand human gestures. We’re already exploring the potential of gesture-recognition technology in all its forms, which will enable VAs to interpret priorities and passion points, for example by identifying when human gestures have become more animated. Gestures could include pointing, eye gaze, and arm movement.

Deep learning will also be critical, and the VA will be designed to observe people and their decision-making process so that they can assimilate it and apply this learning and intelligence to wide-ranging business scenarios.

Problem Solving and Prioritizing

Before long, the VA will begin to independently solve problems and make proactive suggestions for workers. It will have the ability to calculate an individual’s workload, perhaps suggesting when to take a break, as well as to highlight the tasks that should be prioritized or delegated. By this point, workers may come to appreciate that the VA might even know “best” based on analysis of previous behavior and patterns. Equally, tasks that involve the analysis of high volumes of complex data sets will logically be passed to the VA and its advanced processing power.

Ultimately, the VA will help an individual to organize their work or tasks to keep them productive, while also understanding their personal capabilities. The VA may also begin to take on some monotonous, repetitive tasks to assist workers further, allowing them to spend more time engaged in high-level thinking, creativity, and decision-making, making it possible to focus on the best, more interesting work, most of the time.

A Personal Assistant (and Collaborator) for Everyone

What if every office worker had an executive assistant who could help them to quickly find the resources or document they need, be where they need to be, and take care of repetitive and mundane tasks for them? This is the route VA technology is heading, and if humans can begin to view the VA as something that augments their existing job role for the better, there’s huge potential for a relationship of trust and cooperation to eventually grow between the human and VA, where there is true collaboration in decision-making.

It will be important that the benefits and value the VA is delivering are communicated back to the individual regularly, particularly as the technology becomes more sophisticated and the scenarios more complex, so that humans are willing to let the VA assist more.

How Organizations Adapt

Currently, there is much discourse around the impact of “thinking machines.” In this context, VAs could replace human tasks and jobs and change the skills that organizations are looking for in people. This undoubtedly creates anxieties about the future, and the potential for certain human roles to be made redundant. But it is important that organizations adapt for the future now and consider the impact VA and other machine-learning technologies will have on the workforce, in all its complexities.

Ultimately, people will always be the ones in control of how VA technology is designed and used. Humans will never be replaceable, and technology will always be defined by humans. Let us focus on adjusting to a new reality, where human potential is amplified through collaboration with “intelligent” machines, and their time is freed up for higher cognitive work.

*Gartner Press Release, Gartner Predicts 25 Percent of Digital Workers Will Use Virtual Employee Assistants Daily by 2021, January 9, 2019, https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-01-09-gartner-predicts-25-percent-of-digital-workers-will-u