Can conversational interfaces and cognitive computing bring value to Digital Workplaces?

Since they're being praised as the future, I wondered if there's value in conversational interfaces and cognitive computing in the context of digital workplaces. In this post I try to capture what they could actually mean in practice, now or in the (near) future.

To set the general scene, my understanding is that a conversational interface could be an interface for leveraging cognitive computing power in the background and thus surface valuable information to an employee or help him perform tasks. The advantage obviously lies in the possibility of natural language input (and output), which is an easy and natural way for humans to ask something or receive information in order to gain knowledge. This also works well on mobile devices, where typing is often still more cumbersome for data input than just talking.

But what could be valuable use cases for digital workplaces? I've come up with the follwing five:

1. Information Search

Entering a search query in a digital workplace search in natural language (as on Q&A sites like quora.com for example) would already be a big improvement for many. If the system gave back relevant answers, maybe in full sentence format above regular search results, that could be a huge plus. 

The same type of natural language answers by the system could also be given inside microblogs on virtual workspaces (e.g. project spaces), by something like intelligent chat bots. Lee Bryant talks about connecting chat-style interfaces with IBM Watson technology to reach this: "[...] I can’t wait to upgrade my Slackbot to Watson so colleagues can ask simple natural language questions about work and get back useful information in-situ." (see here)

Another option could be natural language answers provided inside intelligent, internal social Q&A components, where next to answers from colleagues, the system itself could provide these.

All of these possibilities would allow an employee to get quick and understandable results to his information search, as long as this works fast enough in the sense that the employee wouldn't have to go through several conversation steps (which would probably feel to slow to get to the information).

2. People Search

This is a use case that could make a typical intranet task easier mostly on mobile devices, leveraging an internal people directory or even rich employee profiles:

Imagine to just say to your phone things like "What org unit does John Smith work in?" or "Whom can I ask something about reverse logistics?" while on the go and without having to type anything. And your digital workplace would answer right away in a full sentence.

3. Intelligent, Automated Recommendations

Automatically surfacing relevant things to an employee is a big benefit in a digital workplace. Automated recommendations based on previous user inputs or behavior already exist in some systems, e.g. of colleagues to connect with, content or documents to look at or attributes to add to your profile (think of Delve or even Sharepoint for example).  However, this mostly doesn't happen in a conversational form but in content-box-type visualizations and is (therefore?) often overlooked by users.

What if there was a "dialog box" on the digital workplace's homepage (maybe above or inside a social or activity stream?) that would put these recommendations in a conversational format? What if it even recommended to take some action because of a data analysis it has made? Let's say for example your workplace "said" to you: "There seems to have been a significant drop in employee comments in the project spaces over the last two weeks, would you like to look into that?" (Nir Eyal made a similar example here.) I reckon such a dialog box would quickly become one of the most viewed contents on a digital workplace dashboard.

4. Personal Assistant Functions

When we take the above mentioned "recommendations in conversation format" further, we're quickly at "personal assistants", which up to now are the most promoted ways of bringing cognitive computing power to people via conversational interfaces (think of Siri, Cortana, Alexa or Viv, which seems to be the most sofisticated approach so far as it's able to write its own code and thus can potentially connect to an unlimited mumber of other apps or services). 

If you transfer personal assistant capabilities to the digital workplace context, obvious examples for helping people with their work could be simple administrative task support, like "create a meeting for 3pm today with John and Mary", or "send John the document I worked on last night", which would save the time to find the document yourself (example taken from here).

But things like the latter example could also work as proactive suggestions from the virtual workplace assistant, facilitating collaboration even more. It could ask the employee: "Should I send the document you worked on last night to John?" because it knows the employee has been working on it and John is mentioned in the document.

5. (Business) Process Execution

If you think about a digital workplace as a place where employees should "get stuff done", you quickly arrive at processes they execute. Substituting form-based administrative processes from internal work context with "conversational forms" could very well make things easier for employees. For example registering for an event, requesting a virtual workspace or putting in travel expenses information (here's a nice collection of examples where forms in dialog format were used in other contexts). I think this works well as long as the form is reasonably short.

It becomes even more interesting though if we start thinking about operational (business) processes. Imagine if you could just tell the dialog box on your digital workplace dashboard in natural language to purchase a certain amount of a material and then start the logistics to ship this to a production site. With cognitive computing power several apps or data sources could be automatically connected to perform this.

Or if you ask your workplace to visualize some analytics data for a controlling process. IBM Watson Analytics for example promises: "The moment you upload your data or tap into provided data sources, you can ask a question in your own words and automatically get a visualization with answers." (see here). Again, a dialog box on the digital workplace homepage could be an employee's single point of access to such things, instead of having to switch applications all the time.

Conclusion

The possibilities that cognitive computing brings for the work context inside digital workplaces seem to be quite valuable if you look at the use case examples above. Providing all these things via an interface that works as a conversation, which is natural way for people to interact, seems to be a good way to help employees find knowledge and get things done. It will be interesting to see if and when some of the use cases I described will be seen in real-life digital workplaces inside organizations. What do you think?