Harnessing human-centric use cases to advance operations

Although the three investigated human-centric use cases have proven to be instrumental in creating various business values for enterprises, there is a shared consensus among both employees and decision-makers that advancing operations stands out as the primary value derived from their utilization. Advancing enterprise operations could mean different things to different enterprises, but it typically involves aspects such as increasing flexibility or boosting the efficiency of a company’s operations, often by capturing value from data, or pushing automation to new frontiers. This can, for example, be achieved by adopting cloud-based collaboration and communication tools and innovation platforms. Other ways to advance operations could include AI-based mass personalization of the customer experience, digital feedback and sentiment analysis, as well as digitally enhanced learning.

A vast majority of enterprise employees say that the greatest benefit of using digital collaboration and development use cases is their "improved work efficiency". This is particularly true for remote meetings, where 18% more employees chose high work efficiency over any other potential benefit in the use cases, see figure 2.

Figure 2: Share of employees stating that high work efficiency is a key reason to leverage human-centric use cases

Decision-makers also strongly believe that human-centric use cases can advance operations in their organizations, with more than 8 in 10 of them linking the use cases with benefits like “improved employee satisfaction” and “enabling process scalability”. However, similar to the findings from the study of IoT use cases, these decision-makers do not rank financial incentives related to advancing operations (i.e., opex reductions) as one of the top benefits of utilizing human-centric use cases. There is also a shared understanding between employees and decision-makers that human-centric use cases drive innovation capabilities. Approximately 8 out of 10 employees and decision-makers see this benefit from applying human-centric use cases. Figure 3 shows the top-5 ranked benefits associated with human-centric use cases, identified by decision-makers.

Figure 3. Top-ranked benefits of human-centric use cases according to the decision-makers

Higher quality work, high employee loyalty, and increased innovation and productivity resulting from improved employee satisfaction, along with the improved efficiency and flexibility brought about by more scalable operations, significantly contribute to advancing operations. The following sections will outline a few examples across different kinds of companies and job roles, where these human-centric use cases contribute to creating the above benefits, as well as outlining the effects of using emerging digital tools to enhance and elevate these use cases.

In today's world, we find ourselves navigating a landscape defined by multiple ongoing crises, which in turn engender volatile market conditions and ever-evolving customer requirements. As a result, the ability to adapt swiftly to enhance customer satisfaction amid such rapidly changing circumstances has become crucial. This environment necessitates a heightened focus on agility for many enterprises.

Of the decision-makers surveyed, 65% characterized their companies as highly agile and lean entities. The findings revealed a significantly stronger inclination (over 65% more) among these highly agile companies to integrate AI-enabled tools into their digital collaboration and development use cases. These tools include features like simultaneous translation and positioning capabilities in remote meetings, AI-based training in remote education, and generative AI for digital product development.

The above observations suggest that highly agile companies are committed to utilizing human-centric use cases to meet their business objectives. Moreover, these companies are increasingly gravitating towards AI-enabled tools and application as preferred methods for pursuing these objectives. AI can empower companies to personalize customer experiences, optimize resource allocation, automate repetitive tasks, and gain valuable insights from data, enabling them to adapt rapidly to dynamic market conditions.

The earlier Future of Work Life study emphasized how the desire for a more flexible work life has become a key driving force in the evolving work paradigm. This new study further confirms those findings by showing that enterprises and their employees are seeking to attain greater flexibility, efficiency, and scalability by leveraging digital collaboration and development tools.

As mentioned earlier, a vast majority of the surveyed decision-makers believe that enabling a scalable operation in their organizations is one of the key benefits of utilizing human-centric use cases. Enterprises seeking scalability through digitalization expect digital tools to easily accommodate their up- or down-scaling without compromising performance and reliability. Scaling physical work environments can be challenging, but virtual collaboration environments can unlock this potential.

Achieving scalability through digitalization highlights the importance of being able to adapt seamlessly to technological advancements, an adaptability that can be achieved by removing technological boundaries and silos. One example for the elimination of technological boundaries is the "device handover" feature that facilitates an easy transfer of ongoing meetings between devices. Enterprises that place a high value on the scalability benefits of remote meetings are strongly overrepresented when it comes to utilizing this feature. In fact, in this group, 70% more companies use device handover than those companies not prioritizing scalability benefits. They also anticipate its utilization to grow by 45% in the next 3-5 years.

Figure 4 shows how a seamless transfer of meetings to different devices in different locations, supported by the meeting continuity feature when changing from WiFi to cellular connectivity, can improve workforce flexibility for a more scalable operation. By 2028, an estimated half of the global workforce will be mobile [1]. Enterprises depending on flexibility, on-the-go access to information and real-time communication can, therefore, boost their productivity and scalability by implementing these features. Particularly relevant are activities in field services, sales, distribution and logistics, healthcare, construction and maintenance or emergency response.

Figure 4. Device handover and meeting continuity features, enabling a more scalable operation in remote meetings

As noted earlier in this chapter, employees ranked high work efficiency as the top benefit of human-centric use cases. The research data suggests that employees who want to boost work efficiency by streamlining their work processes also show a keen interest in leveraging emerging tools in digital product development. For instance, employees in highly process-focused roles (i.e. employees that have job roles with clear rules and guidelines for everything), use AI, IoT and 3D visualization tools 50% more than their colleagues (see figure 5). These employees also expect digital twins to become the main visualization tool for product development in 3-5 years and foresee a 25% higher increase in the use of XR for collaborative innovation in their roles than employees in other positions.

Product and service development often involves a multitude of process-focused tasks, such as prototyping and testing, quality assurance and project management. All these tasks can benefit from the process optimization facilitated by the emerging AI, IoT and visualization tools.

Figure 5: Share of employees that use each emerging tool as part of the digital product development use case, split between employees in highly process-focused roles and everybody else

The findings confirm the high significance and relevance attributed by enterprises to the three human-centric use cases of remote meetings, remote education, and digital product development. Of these, digital product development emerges as particularly noteworthy, marked by its exceptionally high perceived importance, robust investment plans, as well as current and future utilization across all industries.

Figure 6 illustrates that digital product development surpasses both remote meetings and remote education in perceived relevance, current investment levels, and timing of investments. Remote meetings are seen as almost as important as digital product development, but they receive a lower share of current investments from the companies' IS/IT budget. There could be several factors behind this, such as the sudden surge in digitalization investments made by many enterprises during the Covid-19 pandemic. While remote education ranks third in perceived importance, it receives a similar level of investment as digital product development by companies. It is worth noting, however, that the investment plans for all three use cases are, on average, to happen within the next three years, even though investment plans in remote education come a bit later than digital product development.

Figure 6: Relative position of each human-centric use case based on its current relevance to decision-makers (y-axis), current average investment level (percentage of IS/IT budget) and average timing of investments (x-axis) [self-reported]

The high interest in the digital product development use case can be attributed to multiple factors. Firstly, digital product and service development plays a pivotal role in business growth and revenue generation, as it directly impacts the creation and delivery of offerings to customers. Moreover, the rapid evolution of digital technologies, evolving customer expectations and the dynamic competitive landscapes necessitate innovative solutions to maintain a leading edge in the market. The increased utilization of digital product development can, therefore, ensure a significant contribution to advancing operations, creating agility, and boosting resilience in organizations.