Robots available to interview for IT service desk engineering roles

Enterprises can now source and interview robotic IT service desk engineers through a digital worker marketplace, and robots with experience across business functions and industries are coming soon.

IPsoft’s DigitalWorkforce.ai platform, which has been running in beta mode, has gone live, with the service desk engineer robot the first available for interview.

During the pre-launch trials, over 1,500 robots were interviewed, with more than 500 recruited.

The marketplace offers Amelia, IPsoft’s cognitive agent, and businesses can look at its capabilities for certain roles and even interview robots before selecting them. Jobs that the robots are doing include cloud administrators in IT departments and claims administrators in insurance.

The IT service desk engineer robot, which is available now, can take care of IT support tasks including password resets, outlook configuration and troubleshooting, unlocking accounts, VPN troubleshooting, single sign-on problems, as well as ordering new equipment.

Over time, robots will be introduced into roles that are specific to business functions, such as HR and industries such as banking, insurance, healthcare, retail and telecommunications. The jobs being done by the robots are described by IPsoft as “high-friction, low-margin roles”.

They are jobs that have to be done and have high costs, but also ones that businesses make no money out of. Firms are replacing large numbers of staff in such roles with software robots.

Chetan Dube, CEO at IPsoft, expects that within five years, enterprise workplaces will be made up of people and robots in equal number. “The world of work is changing dramatically. By 2025,” he said. “I predict that the workplace will be 50:50 human-digital colleagues.”

He said that software robots will improve with experience. “People continuously learn and improve at their jobs by collaborating and interacting with customers, colleagues and competitors, and the same applies to AI. We are already seeing the substantial impact that automation and cognitive AI can have on an organisation’s productivity and efficiency.”

The World Economic Forum’s Future of jobs 2018 report predicted that 75 million current jobs will be automated by 2022, and that 52% of today’s jobs will be done by robots by 2025.

JP Gownder, vice-president and principal analyst at Forrester, said the creation of bots is accelerating. “CIOs have hired bot masters to manage RPA bots, creatives and designers to improve user interfaces of chatbots and voice skills, as well as process experts to solve business problems,” he said.