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are BOTs your buddies?


For years my work has been focused on elevating the conditions for the last mile of the field workers. The most recent chapter, which started a couple of years ago, has been around taking advantage of the consumerization of asset-based digital fingerprints. Many refer to this as IoT or the Internet of things. While the concept of IoT is not new the amount of information which we are collecting, essentially based on the affordability of the event producer, is tremendous. However, we now have to make actionable this information in a meaningful and relevant way which compels a different outcome at the point of service. This interaction with the field worker is the area which has piqued my interest regarding the use of conversational bots.



When you start to conduct research you discover that these bots (computer-based logical routines and conversational threads) are operating all around you. Sometimes people confuse these bots with sophisticated search algorithms, this is not the area that had any interest to me. Instead, the bot, in my mind, can be used to take advantage of and make meaningful the correlation between a multitude of transactional systems (work order, accounting, CRM, etc.).  Transactional systems can reside either within or outside of your computing environments. One of the greatest advantages, which struck me immediately, was the ability to simply carry on a conversation with a field worker. In the background predicting and guiding the field worker through bots based responses. Why should a field worker be concerned with what system they have to enter this… or go to find that?  As I begin to explore the technology this humanistic conversation based approach, it dawned on me that our possibilities were endless. Not only can we apply these bots, and their underlying algorithms and machine learning routines to field workers, but also apply it to sales, project crews, etc.  Anyplace that we needed to correlate and leverage transactional systems in our daily working routines.  So are the bots coming?  Yes, I believe in the next few years we will see bots everywhere performing small functions and helping us consume multiple perspectives so we as humans can make better decisions.  Are you ready?



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Next post:  technical service crew mix

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