For the longest time, the job of HR professionals was restricted to purely administrative tasks that included payroll and leave management, attendance management, and more. In recent times, these duties have seen a transformation, especially in the corporate sector as the human resources department is now responsible for comprehensive people management. With process automation and given the volume of data involved, robotics and AI tools are now proving to be increasingly significant in the HR sector.
Today, more and more enterprises are creating employee-centric workspaces, ensuring a less stressful environment for their employees. The NLP-AI-powered E42 platform has a lot to offer to make this easier for enterprises through Cognitive Process Automation (CPA) or intelligent automation. Through this powerful, no-code platform enterprises can create and deploy multifunctional AI workers that work alongside their human resources.
‘Cognition’ can be defined as the next stage of machine evolution. We had early stages of machine evolution where thanks to the steam engine we were able to transfer our physical might to the machines. Over time, thanks to the steam engines and locomotives the world literally shrunk as people and goods could be transported across continents easily and people were able to produce to meet that market. With the invention of the IC engine and energy forms like electricity we were able to control these machines quite well and that heralded the era of personal locomotives, radio, and a lot of industries started catering to the masses and as we got really cozy – it practically ignited 2 world wars!
The third post-war machine evolution happened when we made machines that could compute and control other machines (computers) and again transferred our computational abilities to these machines. In all the above cases of machine evolution, we notice one unique reality. The machines did a much better job than humans – they had more physical power, precise control, and amazing computational ability.
This brings us to cognition – the ability of machines to make their own decisions. Machines with cognition can go a long way in ensuring that most of the employees’ needs are met, empowering them to achieve their goals, thereby making the enterprise more productive. This article will delve deep into the power of cognition – how the ability to understand data and take appropriate action is revolutionizing the HR Tech space through streamlined automation of HR processes.
Take any employee in an organization – Alex may be performing a particular function and will be part of a department that has certain goals. For example, Alex may be an account manager in the sales department that has the goal of generating more business from existing clients. To fulfill her responsibilities she will need access to enterprise resources and other departments including HR (to ensure that her personal needs are met and grievances addressed), Customer Relationship Management (to update her efforts and view progress), Enterprise Resource Planning (to ensure that she will have all the resources to provide the service or product to the customer), LMS (to ensure that her learning is updated), and a whole lot of other systems that are needed for her to fulfill her responsibilities.
Machines with cognition can go a long way in ensuring that most of the employees’ (Alex’s) needs are met, empowering her to achieve her goals and thereby make their department and hence the enterprise more productive.
Within HR process automation, a lot can be automated off the bat. AI-led automation can increase efficiency and productivity, and improve the overall management of the company, leading to growth and profitability. When enterprises deploy a multifunctional cognitive agent like an E42 AI worker for HR-centric process automation, they can automate several processes simultaneously. Automating HR processes helps the management attend to employee problems, efficiently handle attendance and leaves, address employee queries, manage low employee retention, and much more. Through process automation in HR functions, enterprises can harness the power of artificial intelligence to automate repetitive HR tasks with the highest accuracy and speed. An AI HR Executive deployed to work alongside the human workforce can get a lot of work done in a considerably short span of time with zero errors and minimal human intervention. For example, if you are an HR Manager, your AI worker has the ability to automatically prompt you for pending approvals or provide instant information to employees on, i.e., policies, SOP, etc.
HR workflow automation streamlines the flow of tasks, documents, and information as per defined business rules. As one of the most integral administrative centers of a business, the HR team deals with many mundane tasks. These admin-heavy HR workflows include updating employees’ information, approving vacation requests, expense reimbursement, and payroll. This leaves room for manual errors and a huge workload for the HR team that can, oftentimes, leave the human workforce in utmost stress and disorder. HR operations automation with E42 removes these burdens from the HR function and automates the entire process, allowing HR executives to focus on more strategic initiatives for the company. The system can be trained to understand the input in multiple languages from multiple sources. It can then pull (status, counts, etc) data from any database connected as part of a workflow. A workflow is a set of tasks in a sequence to accomplish an activity or function. Employees can also push data using APIs onto the database as part of a workflow. Apart from this, entire document sets, videos, etc can be directly fed to the CPA platform for training. These cognitive processes need not be only linked to HR automation. It can extend into other areas like learning management, ERPs, CRM, gatekeeping, etc. by adding more workflows and connecting to other systems.
E42 AI workers, when trained and deployed, save time for the employees by enabling them to access the HR department easily across their platform of choice i.e MS Teams, Slack, Hangouts, etc., and take actions like checking leave status, balance, claim status, complaint status, etc. – without any human intervention. Automation in HR operations also helps employees get notifications, prompts, and suggestions to optimize their effectiveness at work. Over a period of time, when the E42 AI worker starts performing more activities for the employees it gets smarter and provides data-backed and meaningful insights to the enterprise as a whole!
To get the E42 AI worker deployed for your HR function, write to us at interact@e42.ai!
