Why Amazon Alexa could be your next hire

54% of employers are already automating business processes that were once performed by people, according to a recent report from Capita Resourcing, and this figure will only rise in the coming years. Artificial intelligence and voice technology have become a big business, with sales of the Amazon Alexa reaching over 10 million, according to data from CIRP 2017. Products such as Google Assistant, Samsung Bixby, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple's Siri have also made moves into the digital assistant realm.

Driven by customers who want a virtual assistant to ease with running their homes, picking up important tasks such as ordering pizza, setting important reminders, and allowing kitchen appliances to be controlled - could a robotic assistant hold a place within the modern workplace and HR?

BrightHR are utilising Amazon Alexa in their office environment – and this doesn’t mean that a human office assistant has been made redundant as a result. Instead, “a virtual assistant can bring relief and improve mundane HR tasks such as absence management by increasing speed and providing greater consistency in answering frequently asked HR questions,” Alastair Brown, Chief Technical Officer at BrightHR explains. “As a result, this frees up time to focus on what HR do best: nurturing and working with talent.”

Speaking to HR Grapevine, Doug Sawers, Managing Director at SD Worx UK & Ireland, echoes the view that automated core processes can achieve more accurate end results with a reduction in running costs and resources while diminishing the likely human error count, “but this enhanced efficiency does not necessarily mean that there will be less of a role for humans to play in the future, merely that their role is likely to change over time to adapt to rapidly evolving powers of technology,” he adds.