Business leaders today are facing a perfect storm of workforce challenges. Chief among these is the persistence of skills gaps. According to research from Deloitte, 90% of business leaders found recruiting and retaining talent is now a challenge. This is a particular problem for high-growth enterprises, many of which find talent shortages a barrier to achieving scale. Meanwhile, slow-growth companies are being held back by stubbornly low levels of productivity, particularly in the UK, Italy, and Spain. If businesses are to address these and other critical challenges, then they need to get more out of their workforce.
Solving workforce challenges with AI
Businesses are, of course, aware of these challenges and are taking appropriate action. Upskilling and training existing employees to fill key roles is one route. Other businesses are doubling down on employee benefits such as flexible working, health and wellness perks, and financial rewards to attract new staff and incentive existing workers. Now, forward-thinking businesses are looking to AI to unlock the full potential of their people.
AI has the potential to address skills gaps by automating low-value tasks and freeing employees’ time for other, more valuable work. More importantly, however, the latest AI tools promise to go beyond automation use cases to augment and empower human workers. Indeed, this is already happening. Research from Zendesk revealed that nearly 80% of IT and HR leaders believe that AI has significantly improved the quality of employees’ work.
Empowering workers with IT democratization
One great example of how AI is helping to empower human workers is Iron Mountain InSight® Digital Experience Platform (DXP). The platform uses AI to automate manual processes and make information accessible and useful.
Crucially, InSight DXP is a low-code platform. As a result, users can design, build, and deploy solutions rapidly, even if they lack advanced technical skills. The platform leverages Generative AI to speed up solution development. From chatting with a document to an advanced prompt designer, the platform provides UI driven methods to quickly build a document centric workflow, thereby “democratizing AI technology” for complex task automations that were once technically challenging, and which would have required oversight from IT.
The benefits of AI-augmented work
The benefits of this approach are clear to see. By freeing people to work independently, the platform can help increase productivity as employees no longer have to liaise with IT to get their solutions up and running. Meanwhile, the IT team has time freed from support tasks that can be channeled towards innovation and better supporting strategic business goals.
One further benefit of InSight DXP is that by empowering employees to work effectively and at pace, it can help drive engagement and retention by reducing friction from workflow. This can help businesses retain existing staff and attract new hires, helping to build a strong talent pipeline and enable scale.
Given the workforce challenges businesses face today, they need every tool at their disposal to drive productivity and close their skills gaps. Those that use AI to support employees and unlock their full potential, will put themselves on the strongest possible footing for growth.
For more information on how Iron Mountain can help put AI to work in your organization click here.
