Humans and machines in the enterprise – work but not as we know it

September 2025  |  SPECIAL REPORT: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Financier Worldwide Magazine

September 2025 Issue

The year is 2025, and we are already seeing the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace. The predictions of a ‘no-task’ future are rapidly becoming reality. Intelligent automations are already taking over many business processes and related sub-tasks, freeing humans from doing simple and highly repetitive work.

Additionally, millions of us are using generative AI (genAI) daily to enhance our work. Consequently, our initial concerns about wholesale job losses are changing to a more nuanced understanding; that there is a symbiotic relationship between humans and intelligent machines: we can work better together.

AI takes us beyond automation to human augmentation and that is not all. AI brings us more superpowers that are less understood. First, there is its ability to analyse large data sets to help us truly transform and evolve our businesses, sparking a new era of innovation. Secondly, the same analytic capability can deliver an unprecedented surge in data-driven decision-making to boost productivity.

Intelligent automation at work

Intelligent automation technologies have been around for more than a decade. The returns from investing in these technologies are evidenced by significant improvements in some companies’ processes and efficiency.

Take the case of customer service improvements. There are numerous published case studies that show how AI has helped companies improve self-service, reduce ticket volumes and call wait times, and improve customer retention.

Of course, key to any successful automation is best practice in how the AI is developed, deployed and maintained. This includes extensive and frequent testing and getting feedback from all stakeholders as part of a continuous improvement programme.

Assuming best practice in all of the above, every organisation should benefit from adoption of intelligent automation. It is then a question of how to make the most of AI in business.

AI-powered transformation and innovation

Having an AI agent handle customer interactions is only one of the ways to transform services. There are many other ways that enterprises can tap into AI to achieve more benefits, leading to new services and products. It is AI’s power of analysis that makes it a big lever for innovation – allowing us to see what could be done differently and how.

Take the increasing use of AI in the health sector where intelligent analytics  are starting a hyper-personalisation revolution. Supported by AI that joins the dots between a patient's genetic data, medical history, and real-time biometric readings, medics will be able to provide personalised treatments and manage their patients illnesses dynamically. Consequently, the current ‘one size fits all’ approach to healthcare is set to become obsolete while outcomes for patients improve.

Another example is the use of AI in business research and impact analysis. For example, AI for automated regulatory insights could assist corporate lawyers with compliance by helping them keep up with a torrent of new regulations, to proactively manage the entire compliance landscape to track and analyse new laws and regulations. The AI would tap into public sources of information such as  the text of proposed legislation, public commentary and political trends to predict future regulatory changes. Armed with knowledge of the business, the machine would then generate an impact report with an assessment of how the changes would affect the enterprise and suggest how it could get ready for them.

Data-driven productivity: the rise of process intelligence

Another benefit of tapping AI in the enterprise is using its power of analysis to improve productivity when it is used within process intelligence solutions. In this context, AI finds patterns in huge volumes of process data that the solution captures. It then joins the dots to provide insights into how work gets done.

There are very many different ways of using the resulting insights. For example, companies can look at the virtual versions of their workflows produced by the process intelligence solution, and see how many different ways a process is done, and whether the deviations from the standard path present additional costs or risks. Companies could spot redundant steps and bottlenecks too, and optimise their operations.

Another advantage of having process intelligence is that companies have their processes mapped step by step – exactly the information they need to train an agentic AI to automate that process. Having the map of the process with associated information – such as what conditions would require a different path to be taken in the process flow and how some exceptions are handled – will help the agentic AI with its decision making.

Some process intelligence solutions come with genAI which, when armed with the data, can converse with a company to tell it where the issues are and how to eliminate them. GenAI can also make recommendations for automation and the appropriate type of software to use (e.g., intelligent document processing or a chatbot). Every little improvement and small transformation leads to improved throughput and higher productivity. But the benefits do not end there.

Analysis can show who the high performers are in the company’s teams. Accordingly, such teams could be rewarded while others can learn from their best practice to raise their own performance. Managers will be able to see shift patterns and workloads that could be improved and balanced across teams, with those with the capacity to relieve pressure on those overstretched. This is how companies could help staff improve their work-life balance and reduce stress levels to achieve better employee engagement.

There are benefits for employees individually, too. They can be guided by the process intelligence to see how they could improve their own work to achieve more without increasing their working hours. For example, intelligent agents that transcribe and summarise meeting notes or customer calls can save employees a lot of time.

Some process intelligence tools also identify hardware and system-related problems. They can show the employee how to improve their system performance; for instance, habitually keeping too many browser windows open is not a good idea. Subsequently, employees can learn how to make the most of their systems without draining their computing power on redundant applications. By having fewer browser windows open, system performance improves and they save time.

There could be other points of friction in systems outside their control that hamper productivity. By sharing issues with managers, employees can help speed up the pace of change. Perhaps a slow system could be upgraded, a process could be revised or AI, deployed as a personal assistant, could handle some of the basic work (e.g., copy and paste data into multiple systems to keep customer records up to date).

Process intelligence powered by AI means that businesses need no longer operate blindly, relying only on instinct or quarterly reports. Process intelligence turns every interaction, every transaction, every workflow into a rich vein of data waiting to be mined for business and personal productivity improvements.

The future of work: the knowns and the unknowns

We do not yet know what the future holds for humans in the workplace but we are already seeing some of the changes. Today, AI’s power of data analysis is helping and augmenting humans in the workplace in many different ways.

We can predict that trend will continue, with the future of work remaining an evolving and dynamic landscape. It will be characterised by unprecedented data-driven productivity, automation and augmented human capabilities.

The key to navigating this future successfully lies in fostering adaptability, continuous learning and a focus on the uniquely human attributes that AI, for all its power, cannot replicate: creativity, empathy, critical judgment and strategic thinking.

 

Sarah Burnett is the chief technology evangelist at KYP.ai.

© Financier Worldwide

BY

Sarah Burnett

KYP.ai

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