The "digital workforce" has quietly appeared, what kind of transformation will it bring?

With the development of information technology, especially the continuous iterative update of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality, all walks of life have begun to explore the application scenarios of virtual digital people. For example, Baixin Bank launched the first virtual digital employee AIYA (Aiya), Jiangnan Rural Commercial Bank launched the VTM digital employee, and a number of banks tested the water meta-universe and launched a virtual digital person. At the end of last year, the news that "Cui Xiaopan", a digital employee of Vanke Group, won the 2021 Best Newcomer Award of Vanke Headquarters has aroused great concern in the society.

Under the situation of deepening digital transformation and rapid development of digital economy, the deep integration of digital technology with the real economy and social governance is accelerating the reform and reconstruction of economic development and governance models. What exactly is a digital employee? How should we live in harmony with it in the future? How to actively deal with the changes in data elements, economic theories, management models, and people's self-perception brought about by the embedding of digital people in production? These are new issues that require a high degree of attention at present.

What exactly is a digital employee?

According to the IDC Future Scape: Global Artificial Intelligence Market 2021 Forecast, "By 2024, 45% of repetitive work tasks will be automated or enhanced through the use of 'digital employees' powered by AI, robotics, and robotic process automation (RPA)." From the conceptual definition, digital employees are highly anthropomorphic new types of workers created by the in-depth integration of multiple technologies such as "AI+ RPA + data + robots".

The digital workforce is oriented to the digital transformation of enterprises, and the practical benefits it can bring have been valued by all institutions. Deloitte demonstrated the usefulness of "digital employees" through a research report – a $20 billion company with 50,000 employees, 20% of which can generate more than $30 million in annual profits if completed with RPA automation. It may be conceived that in the future work environment, digital employees can automatically implement simple, repetitive, cumbersome and rule-based business processes on PCs and mobile terminals by imitating the working state of human beings, and can liberate general employees from primary and repetitive tedious affairs and devote themselves to more valuable and creative work content, while reducing the cost of enterprise employment, more stimulation of employee creativity, innovation, and creation of value and potential, and better serve the growth of enterprises.

But for such a seemingly valuable new thing, there are many concerns. Why? The four awakenings that human cognition has occurred in "Out of Control" mentioned by futurist Kevin Kelly are worth reading, and he proposes that the fourth is the cognitive awakening of machine intelligence, that is, the era of marriage between organisms and machines that we are ushering in. Whether it is a creature or a machine, it is actually an evolutionary body. As a result, humanity will usher in a world that is completely "out of control", and this uncertainty makes people anxious and afraid.

So, will the AI that digital employees have really threaten humanity? Many film and television works believe that this kind of digital human with artificial intelligence will destroy human beings in the future, which is mainly the result of human beings portraying digital humans as competing with humans and generating unreasonable fears. This kind of fear is certainly a warning to the uncontrolled development of technology, but it may hinder the progress of human cognition and increase the possibility of bad artificial intelligence, which needs to be changed. What people need to do now is to establish a foundation for good artificial intelligence, to make artificial intelligence more human, and to steadily promote the evolution of good artificial intelligence to super artificial intelligence. If it is done well, it will be benign and controllable.

How do we live with digital employees in the future?

In the future, human-machine coupling will become a trend. In order to better cultivate and release this new collective potential, it is necessary to actively face the new changes in the workplace of digital employees joining the workplace, play the new dividends brought by scientific and technological progress, and accelerate the realization of new changes in governance methods.

First, use new technologies for digital employees to broaden the scope of work and improve quality and efficiency. The future of job design will combine the work and responsibilities of multiple traditional positions, using digital technology and digital employees to broaden the scope of work. At the same time, it combines the respective strengths of humans and machines to improve the effective performance of work. Taking SPDB's digital employees as an example, it undertakes responsibilities such as customer service, operational efficiency improvement and internal management, and has formed more than 10 kinds of digital employee positions in recent years, including intelligent customer service, intelligent outbound call, wealth planner, AI training, AI marketer, digital quality inspector, document reviewer, AI lobby manager and other roles. These digital employee positions have greatly expanded the coverage of banking services, effectively simplified the process of customer selection of wealth management products, and improved the quality and efficiency of bank-to-customer services.

Second, promote human-machine collaboration and accelerate digital transformation. In the past, the interaction between humans and computers was caused by humans issuing instructions to computers to work; in the future, as artificial intelligence technology matures further, computers will become more intelligent, can complete part of the work autonomously, and become an important assistant for humans. Human and computer interaction, integration, co-creation, enhance human potential, release more capabilities, create greater value. For example, iFLYTEK's digital employees can already collaborate with employees in recruitment, finance, office and other professional fields to efficiently complete corporate business. For example, document translation requires about 4 hours of human translation per 10,000 words, while human-machine collaboration only takes 24 minutes, and the efficiency can be increased by 9 times.

Third, create a "hybrid" human-machine team to form a new type of collective intelligence force. The "hybrid" work team with the combination of man and machine will become the mainstream of the company's human resources development. According to a survey, more than 90% of Chinese companies surveyed agree that managing a mixed workforce of people and computers and ensuring collaboration between the two is important for companies to operate efficiently, and that neither people nor machines alone can drive the development of enterprises in the coming decades.

In the digital age workplace, people must not only deal with their own "kind", but also have the cognition and skills to work with "outliers", virtual digital employees, and it has become a trend to adapt to and meet the new way of working of "hybrid" human-machine teams. For enterprises and public sector managers, according to the respective advantages of business tasks and human-machine, actively build an efficient human-machine team, including digital employees, continue to promote human intelligence and artificial intelligence to think together and evolve together, lead human-machine symbiosis, jointly cope with future challenges, and ensure that technological development is always constrained by scientific and technological ethics, becoming an important task. We hope that the technologies invented and created by mankind can develop in the direction of helping mankind to be more dignified and free, and assisting mankind to move together to a new height of wisdom and a new stage of civilization development.

(Author Affilications:Chinese Academy of Social Sciences—Shanghai Research Institute of Shanghai Municipal People's Government; Faculty of Economics and Management, East China Normal University)

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