In the next five to ten years, your workplace will look fundamentally different. Thanks to technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and robotics work as we know it will drastically change. The future of work will come with great opportunities but also with plenty of challenges for organisations. It will require employees and management to adapt and work smarter. AI will augment your jobs, the Internet of Things will provide you with details insights and robotics will replace many jobs.
In the coming decade, your workplace will be datafied and digitalised. Digitalisation refers to the conversion of information into digital format, for example converting music into MP3 files, photos into JPEG, text to HTML and analogue video to YouTube videos. Doing so will increase your available data exponentially. Digitalisation, therefore, means capturing human ideas in digital form for transmission, manipulation, re-use and analysing.
Datafication, on the other hand, refers to turning analogue processes and customer touchpoints into digital processes and digital customer touchpoints. Datafication is the process of making a business data-driven – by transforming social action into quantified data. It involves collecting (new) data from various sources and processes using connected devices or creating detailed customer profiles.
Datafying your work starts by making your office, your workplace, your processes and your products smart. This will make previously ‘invisible’ processes traceable so that they can be monitored, analysed and optimised. Thanks to the lowering costs of sensors, increasing low-cost bandwidth, cheap availability of cloud-computing and processing capacity as well as numerous of connected devices it has become easier and cheaper to make these processes smart and help you capture data consistently and universally across different processes, products and workplaces. Datafication and digitalisation are the catalysts for the future of work.
As such, without data, there is no future of work. As I shared earlier, there are three concepts that define the future of work: data, decentralisation and automation. Together, these technologies will fundamentally change your workplace. So, let’s see how emerging technologies will affect the workplace of the future:
AI is the perfect technology to improve your hiring process. You can use the technology to quickly find the needle in the haystack by analysing millions of social profiles, thousands of resumes and quickly detect a list of potential candidates. AI can then automatically interact with these candidates in an engaging manner to build a healthy pipeline of the best candidates. The company Arya is one of the companies that offers organisations intelligence-driven talent acquisition.
Once you have identified a pipeline of candidates, or have a large group of candidates that respond to a job application, you can use AI to assist in selecting the right candidate for your company. There are dozens of AI-powered tools available that assist recruiters in hiring (remote) workers. You can use AI in assessing a candidate’s skills, personality and even the organisational fit. For example, the company Filtered, offers assessments for data scientists and engineers. Each assessment is analysed using AI. Facial recognition helps detect cheating and results are filtered before hitting your inbox, saving the recruiter valuable time when hiring the best engineer.
Facial recognition is one of those technologies that recruiters increasingly use to assess candidates. Companies including Vodafone, Singapore Airlines and Unilever save millions of dollars per year by replacing human recruiters with AI. Thanks to technology developed by HireVue, these companies can screen many more candidates in less time, resulting in finding better candidates for the job.
In the organisations of tomorrow, humans and machines will increasingly collaborate.
