How to think about intangible ROI for x.ai

A couple months ago, we overviewed how we calculate the tangible business ROI for our AI scheduling assistants. We still recommend ensuring any AI investment you make is grounded in providing empirical business value.

However, that doesn’t mean all the rewards you’ll reap from such an investment are easily measured, or will occur in the short term, for that matter. Once you’re feeling confident an AI technology can be directly attributable for saved time, money, or other resources, it’s worthwhile considering the additional intangible values such a technology can provide.

Here are a few additional intangible ROI benefits to consider when bringing Amy + Andrew into your workplace:

Early adoption of a rapidly-proliferating technology

AI assistants have already become a fixture in our pockets and our homes. According to BI Intelligence, 65% of smartphone users were employing voice assistants by 2015, a number that’s only continued to climb as Natural Language Processing grows stronger. Meanwhile VentureBeat reported at the outset of 2018, that 1 in 6 U.S. adults owned a voice-activated smart speaker.

All indications suggest that the usage will flourish similarly in the workplace. Stanford released its first ever AI Index at the beginning of this year, finding that the share of jobs requiring AI skills has increased 4.5X since 2013. The same report forecasted global revenues from enterprise AI applications would skyrocket from $1.62B in 2018 to $31.2B in 2025, a 52.59% CAGR during that time frame.

Those figures underscore the importance of early familiarity with AI technologies. Hiring AI assistants like ours teach teams how to interact in a business setting with a sophisticated piece of technology, and introduces them to the Natural Language Understanding, Reasoning and Natural Language Generation that will only become more commonplace in the future workplace.

In short, gaining fluency in those interactions not only primes your team for a more prosperous future, it empowers you with a technological edge against your competitors in the present.

Increased focus on “pro-human” communication

It’s important to keep in mind that while AI does automate certain mundane logistics, it isn’t replacing the characteristics that make us distinctly human. When you start to buy into the idea of “collaborating” with an AI assistant, it opens the door for increased humanity.  

Take Amy + Andrew, for example. They handle a rote task, but supplying additional context or human finesse to a conversation is still the user’s responsibility. Dennis went into greater detail on this in his guest blog for Mailshake, but the gist of it is AI can give you more time to make the rest of your message memorable.

Imagine you’re a recruiter trying to woo a candidate. Adding a level of personal detail above your meeting request (“I checked out your site and am impressed with the latest project you worked on in your current role (seriously, that Slack integration is brilliant). How about we hop on a call so I can explain why I think you’d be a great fit here?”), means the candidate is impressed with the seamlessness of getting a time on the calendar, and your attention to detail.

An evolution of innovation

One quality we’re particularly proud of here is our ability to evolve to meet the needs of our users. We form close relationships with the teams that use Amy + Andrew, and are constantly trying to understand how Amy + Andrew can serve them even better. In the past six months alone, we’ve introduced new team-friendly innovations like Slack scheduling, dynamic Zoom link generation, Meet Without Me, Instant Coworker Connect, and a better scheduling experience for guests.

That’s a pretty stark difference in philosophy from some of the tech hardware people pony up for each year. Think of phones, tablets and computers, and the frustrating reality of “planned obsolescence.”

The future of work feels more collaborative to us. Having a Slack channel for Time Lords (our power users), office hours for our Product team, and a CEO that’s extremely-responsive on Twitter, are just a few examples of how we sustain a dialogue with the people that know what Amy + Andrew do well, and what they could do better.

The future of work is shaped by those that leverage emerging technologies early. If being a part of that interests you, start your free team trial today!

Lead image via Robert McCall.

The post How to think about intangible ROI for x.ai appeared first on x.ai.