How Agentic AI Empowers Employees

Christine Calhoun:

What are the key benefits of AI for individuals, and how is agentic AI helping to empower employees in their day-to-day work? Jared let’s start with you on this one.

Jared Spataro:

Yeah, there's a lot to say there. I'll start with where Shashank was because I really like the framing. We all have jobs. We all have tasks. We all have objectives today. And one of the first places, the most practical place to start is to ask, well, how could an assistant, an AI-powered assistant, help me do my job better, accomplish those objectives? That's very powerful because there's a lot that we do in our job that isn't directly related to producing the value we're paid to produce, but kind of clears the way. In fact, at Microsoft, we found that upwards of 60% of the time that people spend working is actually spent on high level coordination tax where they're coordinating with other parts of an organization. So one of the ways that you can use AI is to cut through all of that so that you can create more time for you to actually do what you're paid to do to produce the value that you're paid to produce. That said, it's not just an assistant that's meant to remove drudgery. Shashank also said something that I think is really, really valuable. He talked about it without using these words exactly, but as a thought partner, as a value partner, almost in the sense of, you know, if we were to go down to computer software development, almost like a peer programmer. So if you're a writer, it can help you write better. If you're an analyst, it can help you really model more effectively. If you're an artist, in fact, we think it can help you create things you never could otherwise create. So, in just about every field of human endeavor related to business, we think thinking about it as a partner is a very powerful mindset shift that will allow you to see your job in a new way. And that gets to, you know, another thing I think Shashank kind of set the table quite nicely because then you're not only doing your job as it's designed today, you're starting to do things that you never could do before or a new job, kind of a reconfiguration of your job. Again, it's all about value and that's where we get really excited about unleashing human potential in new ways.

Christine Calhoun:

Shishank?

Shishank Gupta:

I think it's interesting when you think of what it can do. I think beyond what it can do individually, I think what AI can do is really help expand and democratize expertise. It's no longer left to the realm of a specific individual, but by leveraging AI and leveraging the knowledge and information that's available to us across the board, I think the ability for a broader and larger team to work on a complex problem or an opportunity becomes that much more easier. What it also does, it really accelerates and amplify the speed to innovation and outcomes and results. And last but not least, I do think, and Jared touched upon it briefly, it really helps amplify the human potential because now not everybody needs to be super skilled in all areas and technologies and domain, but people assisted with AI and bots and agents can do so much more new things and the same things better and differently than they could ever imagine. Here, I want to give you an example of what we've been able to do and how the individuals have been able to benefit. So for one of our large customers, we have a team that's enabling and supporting them on the customer support, the product support side of things. And when we enable this team with agents, what we could find was the dependency that we had on a few key individuals and SMEs to drive resolutions and outcomes, our speed to onboard new associates onto the teams, the resolution time that we had on tickets, which was almost two weeks, 14 to 15 days. Now all of that dropped and we were able to now complete everything down in about seven to eight days. That's huge productivity for individuals. They're happy. They feel more engaged that I'm able to get the task done faster without dependence on people and so on and so forth. So there is extremely high employee satisfaction and engagement within the employees because now they feel their job is more fulfilling. They're able to get the outcomes that they would so really desire. So I think it's a huge impact to the way individuals can benefit from AI.