The Rise of the Superworker: Harnessing AI to Unleash Productivity

Coined an employee who applies AI to dramatically enhance their productivity and performance, the term “superworker” is drawing attention from employees and HR departments alike. However, there’s a lot of ambiguity around the term, and a majority of today’s workforce continues to have uncertainties around the role AI will play in their careers. In fact, more than half of employees feel behind in keeping up with AI and have yet to receive any formal training around the technology.

With a quarter of companies looking to adopt AI, the gap between AI enthusiasm at the executive level and amongst the workforce is a looming challenge. To fully embrace the superworker, employees need to have confidence in these solutions – both from a technical perspective and in relation to how the technology will fit into their current roles. However, the overwhelming perception concerning AI’s impact on jobs continues to lean negative, and many workers view the technology as competition vs. a tool to unleash their full potential.

At the intersection between people and business strategy, HR departments play an important role in guiding executives on decisions around AI in the workplace  and creating a culture that brings synergy to the current workforce and these emerging tools.

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Defining the Superworker

To build employee confidence in their ability to enhance performance through AI, the superworker must first be clearly defined. While this may look different for every organization, there is one critical point to understand: just because an employee uses AI,  doesn’t mean it automatically promises improved performance. Instead, a superworker is an employee who is able to optimize the use of AI in a way that enhances their value and existing skillsets.

There’s a big difference between an employee who simply uses AI, and one who knows how to leverage the tool to work for them. For instance, a “superworker” wouldn’t be considered someone who depends on a tool like ChatGPT to do all the work for them, but instead an employee who uses discernment to decide how to use AI in a way that enhances their ideas, and when human reasoning is needed. AI is truly a tool to augment talent, not replace – and understanding how to use the technology to enhance what humans innately do best is what sets two employees apart.

Not all AI is Created Equal

While AI-fluency is a competitive advantage in the modern workplace, most of today’s employees lack this foundational knowledge. For most organizations, hiring these established superworkers is a costly endeavor, and efforts are best spent upskilling the current workforce. This is where choosing the right tools that fit seamlessly into an organization’s existing environment becomes critical.

The Rise of Intelligent AI 

To understand what types of AI can immediately improve employee outputs, let’s first consider that workers spend on average 1.8 hours every day, or 9.3 hours per week, searching and gathering information. This is the equivalent of a company hiring five people, but only four actually showing up to work and bringing value.

While traditional AI solutions are great at simple task automation, it’s clear that more sophisticated tools are needed to fill these gaps in information retrieval so employees can focus on value-adding tasks that embody a superworker. Unlike chatbots or generative applications, agentic AI is able to handle more complex tasks and provide seamless access to vital information and guidance to help employees reallocate their time elsewhere.

With AI-powered interfaces, team members can easily access information critical to day-to-day workflows at their convenience – all without the need for extensive training. These intelligent bots can be configured to answer questions on demand as well as quickly obtain analysis and insights that would have otherwise taken time to get to. Just imagine what an employee can accomplish with a whole additional workday added to their week.

One System, Multiple Purposes

One single agentic AI solution can be designed in multiple ways to fit the needs of a company across its various departments. This is incredibly important given that the average employee uses 11 different applications each day, and high-performing professionals often manage even more. With each of these functions having its own separate AI integration – none of which talk to each other – managers traditionally had to manually share information between platforms. With agentic AI, a centralized orchestrator enables these platforms to communicate with one another, cutting down on workflow fragmentation and siloed information.

Here are just a few examples of agentic AI use cases across varying departmetns:

• Onboarding and Employee Training: No matter the length of the onboarding process, agentic AI keeps the training resources and information easily accessible to team members. Joining a new company can be a lot to digest, and agentic AI guides employees through the entire process, answers questions and takes appropriate action autonomously.
• Customer Support: AI Agents give users 24/7 self-service options, allowing customer service teams to focus on handling more complex customer interactions, improving the customer experience and driving revenue.
• Advanced Analytics: Agentic AI supports marketing efforts by analyzing how customers are interacting with a businesses’ website and the types of questions they’re asking. With the ability to understand customers’ tone, intentions and deciphering their emotions, AI can equip marketing and sales professionals with deep insights to target their efforts before engaging.

Harnessing the power of the superworker is not dependent on an employee’s AI knowledge base or skill sets. The true power of agentic solutions lies in the ability to effectively remove unnecessary burdens from workers so they can focus on honing their skillsets and empowering employees to drive more value. With the support of the technology, any employee regardless of department has the ability to become a superworker. As enterprises continue to prioritize AI adoption, those who choose solutions that augment human talent and free up valuable time will be the ones to reap the benefits of the technology

Read More on Hrtech : AI Has Landed in HR. Is Your Organization Using It Wisely?

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