So, I am not sure about you, but basically almost no day passes when I am not haunted by this word „bot“. May it be emails of companies reaching out to me to sell me a bot (of course always the best and a „different“ kind of bot) or when my stakeholders or co-workers are asking for a bot for learning course exploration, finding the right policy or anything else. There is no escape – in a good and in a bad way. And don‘t get me wrong, there is for sure something to explore around bots and I can see them having a future in HR Tech – but most of them have three foundational flaws that we need to tackle first.
Are we actually having a problem?
First, and that is something I see in both, the requests reaching me as well as the marketing messages that clog my inbox: They are a solution without asking what the actual problem is? This of course isn’t anything special for bots. That is very often the case with technology: There is a new, hyped product and everyone is getting excited, but what is the actual problem this new technology is supposed to solve? And (a) do we have a problem in the first place as well as (b) is the product really solving the problem? Or just creating new ones in addition to more work? Because implementing a bot is not as simple as it might seem, which brings me to the second flaw.
Bots are hermits
Second, today’s bots are in the most cases stand-alone and specialized, not integrated or only integrated with their specific application. So they are providing a very specific, focused service, but not more than that. They cannot connect to other solutions or help you if you have a question or need that is outside their remit. They just fail then and leave you behind – frustrated.
Are you really getting the solution?
Third, for most things that you want to get done, you need more than „an answer to a question“ or a „policy link“. For a reason we have changed our thinking in the HR space from process to Experience – but which bot can provide you with an E2E Experience? Almost none (and the ones that can also only for very specific use-cases). They are just providing you with a very specific service like an answer to your question or an explanation of „how to do“ something. They don’t provide you support through the complete E2E Experience. And again, where is this significantly better than what we have today? And how many bots would you need to cater for all use-cases? And how would an employee know which bot to use when? I believe that this just creates more confusion than being helpful.
I am not giving up, we just need to live through the hype-cycle
I think we are almost at the end of the hypecycle of bots. I can already see some more E2E thinking when it comes to how bots turn into true assistants and can integrate multiple activities into one Experience. The clear signal that we have reached the end is when the bot technology is no longer in teh email-subject or mentioned prominently, but only mentioned in the details of HOW a Tech solution is solving a problem for you. But before we get there, there are still some questions to be answered by the industry as well as by our stakeholders (I mean our employees). And we need to define what kind of Assistant-Experience we want to build.
Polar opposites of Assistant thinking
When I try to explain as well as explore the directions I see the Assistant space going, I start with two polar opposites – and I don‘t know which one has a future and which not or do both? It is not that straight forward (yet).
On one end of the continuum you have the “One Assistant to rule them all” – you have one Assistant that is either all-mighty or sits on top of all other (hidden) bots. As an employee you have one place to go, one Assistant that you can ask anything – any question or action – and this Assistant will be able to help you E2E, either itself or via instructing other bots to get the work done and surface the result again through the single Assistant interface. I would love that – but not sure if this is feasible and when this is feasible.
On the other end of the continuum you have the “iPhone approach”. You have one central device or place (for example Slack or MS Teams) and a set of separate Assistants each for its specific purpose (like the different Apps on your iPhone or Pixel or Galaxy…) and it is simple and clear which Assistant to be used for what, when, how. – it seems not to bother us too much in our private life, so I consider this a valid option on the other side of the continuum.
As I said, I am not sure which way the industry and our stakeholders will go – but what I know is that we need to explore and test & learn in this space quickly to get feedback, learn and can inform our future strategy – while at the same time we should not give in to any bot for any use-case (especially if we are not clear if there is a problem or not…)
Chief HR Officer 