Office work often involves tapping away on the keyboard for vast swathes of the day and going for the occasional coffee break. However, that tempo of work is coming to an end.
Many employees are cottoning onto the fact that new technology is enabling them to cut the length of the working day considerably.
This process began in earnest around 2020. That year, a host of powerful new tools entered the market and began to save workers a lot of time.
Later on with the release of GPT-based technologies, those time-savings went into overdrive. All of a sudden, you could get software to draft you an email or create a document template for you.
These changes meant that the productivity of labour per hour worked went up. People working in offices could finally get more done every day.
The New Office Technologies
But what new technologies are coming to the fore? That’s a question that brand Apryse has been working on. The company is increasingly looking to AI to provide seamless solutions that eliminate the vast majority of document creation tasks.
“The idea is to automate as much of the document generation process as possible,” CEO Cassidy Smirnow says. “The technology now exists for employees to simply provide prompts to software and get the documents that they need generated.”
Apryse recently acquired the AI firm, LEAD Technologies to help it achieve this goal, adding to a long list of M&As in recent years to keep it at the forefront of the market.
The hope is that these new office technologies will drive the wave of output-per-hour improvements anticipated at the end of the 1990s when the internet came along.
Here are some of the ways the new office technologies are helping:
Repetitive Tasks
The first area we’re seeing this new wave of office technologies being put to use is in the realm of repetitive tasks. Companies want software that will enable their workers to complete items like form sending and data entry rapidly, cutting their wage bills.
However, the ability to generate documents also falls into this category, particularly in the legal sector. Many attorneys find themselves writing up the same set of documents day in, day out.
“This is something Apryse is trying to tackle,” Smirnow says. “Legal professionals spend a lot of their time simply producing documents for clients and to ensure they remain compliant. Having tools in place that let them tailor the format or move chunks of text around in permissible ways is a surefire way to save a lot of money.”
The hope is that the new technologies will free up time for legal professionals and other office workers, allowing them to focus more on creative tasks or business opportunities. It may also cut the need for paralegals – people who work under the lead attorney and simply complete the requisite paperwork.
Communication and Collaboration
Related to this, new office technologies are also facilitating cooperation and communication opportunities between staff. Platforms are simplifying the process of directing people towards the most valuable tasks.
The goal of these applications is to reduce management burden and cross-talk between employees. Instead of using a system of disjointed emails or live chat responses, the idea is to leverage a single platform that provides real-time visibility to everyone in the office.
Monday.com is a good example of this technology in practice. The app allows employees to post the stage they’re at on a specific task publicly, keeping everyone else informed. It also tells them what they are working on now, and what’s next on their priority list.
This high-level information might sound trivial, but it can make all the difference in the world to an office-based enterprise dealing with information overload.
The technology can prevent the sending of thousands of unnecessary emails a month and prevent people from feeling overloaded. Everyone knows where everyone else is at and what they have on their priority list, improving the quality of interactions and reducing reliance on emails.
Improved Data Analysis
The new cluster of office technologies is also improving how companies do their data analysis. Instead of focusing on old-fashioned regression analysis, many are tapping into business intelligence (BI) tools that provide varying levels of abstraction, making them suitable for non-technical audiences.
The wonderful thing about BI is that it can integrate into an existing software stack. Usually, it doesn’t matter where you keep the data, the software can find and leverage it to provide you with insights.
Furthermore, many tools are now incorporating AI to make them even more potent. Employees can simply ask systems to provide them with a specific type of analysis and get the software to produce it for them.
Lastly, on this topic, some businesses are also using real-time analysis to enable workers to make more informed decisions. These data are being fed through to their devices and end-points, letting up update their decision-making in response to established rules, not managerial decree.
Scheduling and Time Management
Calendar apps and scheduling software are also making a tremendous difference to the amount of work office staff must do by hand. Now workers can become their own secretaries, using software to manage their time.
As anyone who works in an office knows, scheduling and making calendar entries is a time-consuming and laborious task. Usually, it is something staff have to fit into their Friday afternoons to get them ready for the upcoming week, preventing them from going home early.
But with scheduling and management software, a lot of that work disappears. Even if manual entry is necessary, many feature shortcut tools that streamline the process and help them get more done.
There are also enhanced collaboration features built into many of these tools. These allow everyone to contribute to scheduling and ensure they are on the same page.
Integrations with existing software help, too. These mean that customers or other systems can potentially arrange scheduling on workers’ behalf.
For instance, some companies link their online scheduling via their website to their in-office tools. These specific appointments can be fantastic for client-focused businesses.
The software could also integrate with HR departments, allowing them to post office-wide scheduling that individual workers need to fit their regular schedules around.
There are even some workers using voice-activated AI assistants to manage their time and schedule, based on period feedback. These systems attempt to fill schedules optimally, given the owner’s working patterns and productivity at different times of the day.
Customer Service
There’s also a move to incorporate technology into the customer service-facing end of office-based businesses. Companies want systems that let them chat to clients without them having to dedicate any of their precious labour to the task.
There are several technologies already facilitating this, but most of them hinge on chatbots. These clever pieces of technology can strike up conversations and even respond in natural language to the questions and requests that users make.
For example, office-based firms can now get live chat software that uses bots to interact with visitors as they arrive on their websites. These tools drum up conversation and use it to gain contact details.
However, many of the most advanced systems can go well beyond this and offer full conversational functionality and even troubleshooting. This capacity means that office workers don’t need to dedicate as much of their time to dealing with these issues.
Chatbots are also helpful for responding to emails. Many systems can read existing emails and then patch together a response that meets the requirements detailed in user prompts.
For example, many companies are now using AI to respond to angry customer emails. Instead of getting staff to read through the complaint in its entirety, they’re pasting them into text-generators and getting them to write a response.
This technology is similar to what Smirnow is referring to in the legal sector. However, it is not the same. While legal automation requires sticking with formal language, regular email response technology can simply focus on saying things that will assuage the other party.
Financial Management
Finally, many companies are eliminating the need to do their financial management by hand. Automated accounting software and payment processing are streamlining the process and making it considerably more efficient.
For example, we’re seeing a lot of companies using bookkeeping tools that let them track invoices and expenses in real time. Often, workers only need to type a couple of numbers or press a few keys to update the system with the latest financial information.
Expense tracking is also becoming more straightforward. Workers can track expenses on their phones, take pictures and automatically upload relevant information to the software. Then, the software uses clever text recognition tech to make the proper entry, all without any human involvement.
Automated payment processing and receiving is also making the task more straightforward. For example, we’re seeing many businesses now adding payment facilities to the invoices they send online. Clients only need to click a link that forwards them to the proper payment page to carry out the transaction.
