What is a Digital Worker?

A Digital Worker is a highly skilled AI-enabled digital employee that works alongside real-world colleagues to reduce manual work, enhance quality, increase speed, save money, support compliance and expand the overall capacity of the team.

The concept of “digital workers” has been around for years, promising always-on, 24/7/365, availability at perfect, consistent accuracy without fatigue.

Others in the industry define “digital workers” as software robots or “bots” that you build on a platform to perform certain tasks or processes.

At WorkFusion, we look at digital workers a bit differently. Our pre-built, AI-enabled Digital Workers are process automation personified. They are valued digital members of your team who work alongside their real-world colleagues to reduce manual work, enhance quality, increase speed, save money, support compliance, and expand the overall capacity of your team.

They take care of the often mind-numbing and repetitive activities such as data collection, document handling, and false-positive clearing – freeing-up their colleagues to work on more strategic and fulfilling projects. And they expedite previously slow and ineffective work that helps to improve customer service.

Our Digital Workers are true knowledge workers that embrace the six C’s of digital work. They are consistent and have a high level of competence, having been trained with data (securely) from multiple organizations and taught by subject matter experts in the tasks they automate. They’re curious, able to learn and improve over time, and collegial, successfully passing escalations to people on the team. They’re highly capable, by which we mean they leverage a full set of digital capabilities: machine learning including natural language processing (NLP), pre-built connectors, optical character recognition (OCR), etc. work together to automate end-to-end operational processes. And they are cohesive and applicable across the line of business.

The bottom line is that WorkFusion’s Digital Workers are more than just “bots.” They are smart, trained and effective digital employees that can be a valued member of your team.

Why the Future of Work Includes Digital Workers

Let’s face it. There is too much work and not enough workers.

Work has fundamentally changed over the past several years, driven largely by the pandemic, employee burnout and the Great Resignation. Now we’re dealing with the fallout of a potential recession and hiring freezes. This, of course, coincides with increasing workloads.

Teams are stretched by doing more with less, but at what cost?

Five years ago, Michael Chui from McKinsey & Company said this about workplace automation: “It’s clear from our research, but also just looking at history, that people increasingly, over time, will have to be complements to the work that machines do. Work side by side or work with machines. We’ve certainly seen this in history, in all kinds of places. Everywhere from the farm, where we now have gigantic machines that help harvest and sow crops, to being in an office environment, where there’s work that we used to do by hand or by calculator and now software helps us do it, whether it’s spreadsheets or word processors or even more sophisticated analytics. Going forward, we’re going to see more of these technologies which involve robotics or artificial intelligence, again, working side by side with human beings.”

Fast forward to 2022, and today’s Digital Workers are fulfilling that promise and vision.

According to Liz Wiseman from the Wiseman Group, her research surveying professionals across a variety of industries “revealed a strong correlation between “challenge level” and “satisfaction level” at work, meaning that, as the degree of challenge in one’s work increases, so does job satisfaction.”

Repetitive manual and mundane tasks can get tiresome for even the most dedicated and enthusiastic employee. Plus, these tasks are often error-prone. By offloading these tedious yet important jobs to Digital Workers the team is able to focus on more strategic and fulfilling work – increasing employee job satisfaction.

Putting Technology to Work

Out of the box, WorkFusion Digital Workers incorporate a combination of industry-specific process knowledge and valuable technologies – including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), intelligent document processing (IDP), robotic process automation (RPA), and pre-designed application connectors. As a result, they arrive on the job fully trained and immediately productive, working seamlessly side-by-side with your traditional team members.

WorkFusion AI-led Digital Workers support the broadest array of possible use cases because they can tap into numerous information sources and apps – both on-premises and in the cloud – and make informed decisions. Just like human workers, AI-led Digital Workers complete their work independently or under human-in-the-loop supervision, with increasing autonomy as their learning accelerates, and you can always customize their tasks to suit unique processes within your organization.

The Digital Workforce in Action

So, what could this AI-led digital workforce actually look like? Let’s look at a few examples:

1. A digital Entity Sanction Screening Analyst who analyzes and investigates sanctions alerts regarding entities, individuals, and securities. It searches and reviews databases and media sources, etc. to determine relevance of alerts and whether mentions are potentially adverse. It compiles facts and records evidence from investigations for compliance and internal audit trail.
2. A digital Transaction Screening Analyst analyzes and investigates payment alerts generated against sanctions screening lists originating from SWIFT and FUF messages. It scans internal systems, commercial databases and the public internet; gathers data; and records evidence, compiling facts for compliance and internal audits to ensure adherence to regulatory policies for customers and transactions.
3. A digital Insurance Underwriter collects, reviews, and analyzes new business applications across commercial lines. It also qualifies accounts according to company guidelines, researches property locations for prior coverage and losses, obtains additional information to determine coverage needs, and enters quotes in quoting and rating system.
4. A digital Customer Service Coordinator engages with customers for required information on account opening and other key processes via email. It evaluates and responds to service inquiries across different communications platforms; routes inquiries among internal departments to address customer requests, obtaining internal approvals when needed; and enters orders, opens cases, or completes customer-related tasks in internal systems.
5. A digital Customer Identity Program Analyst ensures that proof of identity is captured and input into the system of record for customer onboarding or know your customer (KYC) onboarding and refresh projects. It provides quality assurance reviews on customer identity documents against customer records.
6. A digital Due Diligence Program Analyst captures and interprets ownership and legal structure information for customer onboarding or Know Your Customer (KYC) refresh initiatives. It provides quality assurance reviews of documents against customer records.

Is a Digital Worker Right for Your Organization?

WorkFusion AI-enabled Digital Workers can be a valuable part of your talent mix. They are doing the jobs that your employees don’t want to do, and they don’t mind doing it. With Digital Workers you have an efficient path for positive business outcomes, better customer experience (CX), and ultimately an improved employee experience (EX). These skilled, experienced virtual employees provide a consistent, always-on tech resource. Any organization can consider them as reliable and helpful coworkers for all existing analysts and operators on a team.

Request your Digital Worker demo here.