Digital Co-workers vs. Chatbots vs. Bots – The Best Choice to Augment your Workforce

Do you think organizations should leverage automation to augment their workforce? Many of us are aware of the RPA but fail to understand intelligent automation. It is about automating multiple tasks designed to meet complex business needs. Digital co-workers, chatbots, and bots – aid in automation in their own ways. Let us looks at the best choice between digital co-workers vs. chatbots. vs. bots.

The Workforce Dilemma

The latest report from the National Bureau of Economic Research in Aug’22 said that around 500,000 workers disappeared from the workforce in the US alone, after the pandemic. It was not a while ago that this news was published and the scenario in October changed. As of mid-November, more than 73,000 workers have been laid off by tech giants in the US.

How do organizations deal with labor shortages and fluctuating demand? Digital co-workers, chatbots, and bots help organizations to streamline their employees’ efforts.  Will digital co-workers help organizations augment their workforce? You can get many answers by reading through the pointers about digital co-workers vs. chatbots vs. bots.

What is a Digital Co-worker?

A digital co-worker, as the word says is a non-human co-worker who simplifies your processes by leveraging intelligent automation. Powered by AI, machine learning, RPA, and knowledge mining, they automate multiple tasks in a sequence to enable a complex business need from scratch.

Most organizations refer to them as the next-door helping hand to perform more routine and repetitive business processes. Unlike bots, they deal with multiple tasks in a process. Also, digital co-workers are intelligent to ask you questions and improve the experience. You can also train them to learn as they progress through the process for several iterations. They can remember past interactions and analyze them. Based on this, they understand the human intent and provide accurate support as per the business needs.

What is a Chatbot?

Chatbots became prominent in many industries during the pandemic. Incorporated to simulate a chat through web, mobile, and SMS; they understand the user inquiries to propose a solution. In recent times, they have evolved from simple rule-based to complex AI-powered chatbots.

With AI, machine learning and NLP, AI-powered chatbots understand the conversations and respond with multiple suggestions.  

What is a Bot?

Digital Co-worker performs the overall business function, chatbots address the communication issues. But a bot is a software application programmed to do a specific repetitive task that is normally done by humans. They operate without any human support and without errors.

Digital Co-workers vs. Chatbots vs Bots

Before providing more details about the comparison, let me quote an example.

The most common use case that anyone can relate to is from customer support. Consider the goal of canceling an order. How can the Digital Co-worker vs. Chatbots vs. Bots address this issue?

Bot – It is like performing a business function of canceling the order. So, it triggers an email or notification to the concerned PoC or business function. That is the end of it.

Chatbot – When the customer texts about canceling the order, it will ask a few more questions. For example, the order details, customer details, logistics, and tracking details. Also, it tries to gauge the tone of the customer and gather feedback about the satisfaction scores.

Digital Co-worker – Once the customer initiates the order cancellation, a digital co-worker sends a notification or triggers a conversation with the logistics, warehouse, sales, finance, and support executives. It sets a sequence of actions across all the business functions to complete the event. Also, it triggers another conversation with the customer about any other related products/services that might interest him. A digital co-worker is like a next-door employee who performs all the actions to augment human interactions.

This gives us a hint about the digital co-workers vs chatbots vs bots in the customer service scenario. In general, let us look at the distinction in functionality and how they augment the workforce.

Complex tasks management

Digital co-worker – As they execute a sequence of actions and complete the job, digital workers perform high-value jobs. Powered by a magnitude of technologies, organizations can trust digital workers as the most efficient employee.

Chatbot – Usually, chatbots handle complex conversations and trigger the workflow accordingly. But they are not great at performing sequential tasks.

Bot – In most cases, bots handle simple tasks. They are like command execution assistants. If you hint them to book a movie ticket, you must give more details by yourself to execute the task.

Breaking down silos

Digital co-worker – Information is shared with different business functions to complete a task or workflow. Hence there is minimal possibility of data silos with a digital co-worker.

Chatbot – With a chatbot, you have to trigger related tasks and set up conditions in order to have a seamless information flow. It involves more effort and leveraging other technology and applications to break down silos.

Bot – There is a high possibility of information silos with the bot. As you trigger an activity and it does not update the related tasks in other business functions, it may be cumbersome for employees in many scenarios.

Effective workflows

Digital co-worker – You can save a lot of time in executing your workflows with a digital co-worker. They usually replicate the workflow in a similar fashion with an employee but improve the efficiencies by 30-50% depending on the activity.

Chatbot – Usually a chatbot performs customer service in the most efficient way. Mostly, they are experts in communications and improve interactions with the business. Other than customer service, you can use chatbots to improve the experience for the stakeholders and information sharing.

Bot – Mostly bots are used to reduce human error and automating routine tasks. Hence, we may not consider them for executing complex workflows.

Employee experience and engagement

Digital co-worker – When you can augment the workforce with a digital co-worker, employees can trust the results. Also, they reduce a lot of manual work for employees. It will definitely boost employee morale and experience. Your employees can focus 100% on high value tasks.

Chatbot – Usually, chatbots are not a holistic solution across business processes. They resolve a few challenges encountered by employees but not everything.

Bot – You can always trust a bot to perform a simple command that is usually routine for your employees. Every time you are in a quest for such processes and at times, they may go unnoticed.

Cost savings

Digital co-worker – When you can save effort in a process, it will resonate to cost savings. Depending on the use case you can save up to 70% of your costs by augmenting your workers with digital co-workers. You can use them mostly for dynamic conversations.

Chatbot – By automating conversational workflows, you can also save costs up to 70% specific to that process. But you may not replicate the same for every process in your business.

Bot – If you look at the action that you are automating, you may find cost savings. But when you look at the organizational perspective, they may not be so high.

Overall, digital co-workers offer the best solution to augment your workforce throughout the processes in your organization. They are the next best companions to execute the process holistically. Let me walk you through DigitalClerx, our offering to augment your workforce.

DigitalClerx

Saxon’s DigitalClerx transforms your processes and augments your workforce.

• No platform and licensing costs
• Exceptional business outcomes
• Examples include – KYC analyst, customer support analyst, invoice processing executive, and any custom role that you would need
• Human in a loop to resolve any issues
• 30-70% cost savings
• Zero errors

We do have accelerators to unlock the value from your existing landscape. Our experts will identify the use cases and envision a roadmap for DigitalClerx implementation. Initiate a conversation now!