“I never worry about the future.
It comes soon enough.”
Albert Einstein
We can easily recall unfulfilled forecasts about the future in various spheres. Sometimes they are naive like the one about the problems of horse-drawn transport in London and often based on a simple extrapolation of existing phenomena.
But even if futurologists describe the examples of future technology relatively accurately, little attention is paid to the organization of the society itself. Why is this happening? It is easier for us to imagine existing forms of organization simply by equipping them with enhanced tools. Such a discrepancy is especially clearly noticeable in science fiction works: transferring the action to other planets and for hundreds and thousands of years ahead, they preserve stereotypes about workers in workshops, bosses in large offices, secretaries with coffee and miners in helmets.
In the short perspective, the situation with forecasts is somewhat better, but the speed of the changes around us tends to increase. The large companies in various spheres change our way of life and habits, but what about the organizations themselves? What changes should occur in the structure of the company to keep it at least modern or prepared for the future at best? If we are going to formulate a universal answer suitable for any organization, we will spend so much time that will find ourselves in the future.
A good example of the existing organization classification is the work “Discovering Future Organizations” by Frederic Laloux, a former partner of McKinsey. Like any model that represents real processes and devices, the color scale of organizations is presented with a certain degree of conventionality. The author himself agrees with this, pointing out that in the real world organizations successfully combine the features of various approaches to management.
After a historical review and analysis of the organizational paradigm evolution, Laloux distinguished seven stages assigning each with its own color, from infrared to teal. The Infrared and Magenta colors corresponded to the time when humanity first united into tribes, the Red one corresponded to the era of wars and conquests, the Amber color associated with the formation of church and caste organizations, colonies and other hierarchies; the Orange stage corresponded to the gap between the Renaissance and our time, with a materialistic view of the world, the emergence and strengthening of meritocracy with competition; and the Green stage was consistent with the emergence of concepts of stable development and mindset freedom.
The transfer to the next paradigm changed the foundations of human society: the technical and economic base, social orders and political leadership, religious and spiritual orders. It is likely that with the transition to the evolutionary “teal society” we can confidently expect the fundamental foundations of human civilization.
While most of the modern organizations prefer the Orange paradigm, the Green one is more represented in the scientific community, the last, the Teal stage should be sought to build the organizations of the future.
What is so special about the teal organizations of the future? They possess three distinctive features from the organizations of the previous stages and are able to solve problems more effectively.
Integrity as the Basis for Trust
The second feature is integrity. The personal traits of employees become their advantages. There is no need to follow the standards of the corporation, “wear a mask” or constantly show only narrow-focused professional qualities. Such a company encourages both emotions and intuition in addition to rationalism.
It is difficult to imagine a future company where the dress code is strictly adhered to without proper reason (if we do not talk about the companies where it is necessary because of the duties performed). It is important to convey the procedure of work to the company’s newcomers, as to carry out the adaptation procedure.
You can also use a chatbot at this stage, as it provides a new person with a simpler way to ask questions, and the answers will be provided by a competent staff. The process of adaptation in a self-organizing team is able to disrupt anyone, so let the person get accustomed and give access to all the information. This will allow them to feel trusted and study the work specifics by themselves, even if your new colleague is a professional. For example, in VALVE a paper (and online) versions of the “Freshman’s code” is given out, together with an application to search for employees in the office; in fact, this company is one of the examples of teal teams among game developers.
The understanding of the fact that a slip in the teal company is not an excuse for bullying but only one more topic for discussion and improvement is able to motivate the employee for further growth and feedback.
The situations when an employee “did not know” the necessary information or did not make an important proposal at a convenient moment are minimized. For convenience, it is not necessary to waste the time by letting all participants making offers. You can record all comments, wishes or objections of employees, adjusting the circle of recipients flexibly according to the current situation in the company by connecting the chatbot interface and the company’s blockchain system.
The second paragraph echoes with the “green” organizations in a way, allowing employees to feel as an integral collective, a single “family.” This is the way many modern companies are run, but it is important not only to conduct corporate events but also really feel ourselves part of a single team taking responsibility. Many of the companies claiming their team to be a single family do not really provide their employees with all the information about the company’s operation.
Evolutionary Goal as a Way to the Future
The third feature is the presence of an evolutionary goal. The presence of a strategy or slogan of the company ceases to be an exclusive marketing tool as the employees are trying to understand how to best achieve the overall goal instead of fighting for narrow indicators in the short term.
The head of the future organization retains the responsibility to represent the company in the external world. This is important when customers, suppliers, and supervisors want to communicate only with management.
Many companies use the “Empty chair” technique, but it is easy to reproduce it with more modern methods. The point is to raise the question “Did this meeting serve the purpose of the organization?” at each important meeting and clarifying questions with feedback. Given that the meeting can be held online, chatbots can easily collect this information and then transfer it to the entire team in a convenient form. It is easy to implement such a functionality with the help of existing solutions: BRN.ai chatbots will help to establish both internal and external communication with customers and employees.
Can we assert with confidence that the future belongs exclusively to teal organizations? Intuition tells us that such a powerful tool as blockchain makes this type of organization not only possible; it will necessarily take its position among the organizational paradigms of the future. The most preferred form of ownership for a teal organization is the investors giving credit for its autonomy.
The all-round appearance of such organizations of the future can affect our society much more than industrialization or the development of an accompanying infrastructure.
In the short term, traditional organizations should perhaps be afraid not of jobs shortening caused by artificial intelligence but self-managed teal organizations that can evolve into something bigger, giving people the real goal and ways to achieve it.
3. Blockers to Using Chatbots
There are some inaccurate inferences, that can lead astray the one, who’s enquiring the success of chatbots:
“Chatbots will be able to execute all kinds of interactions that are currently being performed by humans regarding online business”. Well, maybe it will happen in the future, but certainly not in the closest one. Even the most advanced chatbots abilities will be limited by pretraining models, as until some revolutionary highly skilled AI appears they are not capable of cognitive perception.
“Chatbots can be used only for the first line customer support and that’s the extent of it”. This cliche is surprisingly prevailing among business holders. But it is so easy to discover hundreds of factual chatbots to ascertain that the customer support is the one but not the only of their possible appliances.
“Chatbots are new apps”. Well, it’s not that right. While competing with apps to retain customers’ attention, chatbots are still being the program interface, that works overriding existing apps (either messengers or social networks aka we can see it at Facebook Messenger). Separate chatbots versions are usually less known and popular in comparison to their mobile analogues.
“All the chatbots should be fitted with AI”. That is not true. Somany types of business just do not require such a complicated functions. A target can be met after responding to a couple of fixed inquiries, and the inquirer itself can be set by means of the solution tree or the rule-based mechanisms. Such a chatbots will have the possibility to be improved by AI in some later stage, bettering their answering abilities.
“Chatbots and smart assistants are the same sort of thing”.
Well, there are many cases when it is commonly held that “chatbots” and “smart virtual assistant” are being mentioned as interchangeable concepts, but still their basic principles of work may critically differ. Being usually built-up upon modern messengers, chatbots are convenient for definite problem solutions, such as customer support, service providing automatization and, of course, answering questions. Chatbots are eventually ad-hoc, despite thousands of use cases. The smart assistants are usually created to solve more complicated tasks, so not each chatbot can be defined as a smart assistant and vice versa.
The most common reported complications occurred while using of chatbots are shown in the subscriber polling performed by Drift, SurveyMonkey Audience, Salesforce and myclever:
The basic reasons mentioned were as follows: an intention to deal with a real life assistant (43%), possible algorithm mistakes worries — 30% and finally — the platform limitations (27%), as Facebook Messenger is not suitable and acceptable by all internet community members as the one and only way of interaction with bots. And even though Facebook is universally acknowledged as an industry leader, the chatbots access through an independent channels and other social media resources should be preserved.
The chatbot business investment growth increased by 229% IN 2015–2016 according to ROKO Labs & BI Intelligence co-research. The “stable” mobile apps investment grew by 66% only during the reporting period.
It’s plainly seen out of the Business Intelligence research that a significant cost saving yearly occurs courtesy of chatbots implementation up to 29% — 46% (depending on business dimension).
Business bots are essential investment targets (B2B). Fund clients prefer to make investments into inner business processes optimisations, such as HR-department chatbots, despite media exclusionary scrutiny to “user” chatbots.
Actually, bots have strengthen their role in workforce automation. According to McKinsey research in almost 29% of US customer care could have been automated by means of chatbots or their counterparts.
Chatbots: Insights, Cases and Benefits
Comparing fashion purchase journeys that start on a mobile app versus on desktop, Facebook IQ
Year by year net surfers become more critical to instantaneous forms of communication while using different messengers. Any business that still manages with emails or phone calls is considered to be outdated. Chatbots really can close the gap between business and consumers.
Scalable chats can offer performing customer service round the clock. THe reliability, accuracy and failure-free performance are fundamental advantages of chatbots. The development of the effective bot will result into stable and constant task solution.
Eventually chatbots give the business the conception of how exactly their clients talk, that will improve the respond to their requirements in the subsequent. While gathering the unique answers and clients’ cases a credible business model can be built, safe for possible replication by competitors.
All the advantages mentioned are attested by Drift, SurveyMonkey Audience, Salesforce, and myclever research:
24/7 access is preferable for over 64% of customers, more than a half of respondents care for the answer bit rate — 55%, and answers to simple questions are relevant for 55% of customers.
Along with that we can see that preferences vary depending on respondents’ age. The younger the respondent is, the more benefits he can appraise. There are still reserved results as for intelligent functions.
GumGum made a poll among North America Marketing and Advertising executives in June of 2017 to find out their chatbot relation: 27% of respondents declared the impactful chatbots implementation, 28% used chatbots just a little.
According to 2017 Global Human Capital Trends Report, 41% of companies chief executives claimed to have implemented chatbots already either to have prepared cognitive AI-technologies to be implemented in some close future. Other 34% of respondents have launched the pilot prototypes.
According to Gartner и Juniper chatbots will be involved in 85% of all types of business-customers interaction by 2020.
What are the basic reasons for consumers to trust chatbots, favouring them amongst other ways of communication?
- In comparison to the traditional graphic interfaces, chatbots have a variety of advantages as for end customer. Chatbots can simplify the apps, offering them just to say or type something rather than to switch to another page in the browser to search for some essential information.
- Chatbots dialogue interfaces are being constantly perfacted — they make an interpretation of user’s natural language and can react immediately.
- Users can implement a chatbot to regulate several business apps at the same time. The concurrent ring up to a couple of chatbots while communicating with other participants.
All this advantages can give an incompetent consumer a chance of intuitive usage of the complex applications in the familiar interface. Chatbots automatisation opportunities are huge, as they can conduct processes by means of the natural language dialogue.
What it will mean for business? A lot of pleasant benefits such as funds saving at the cost of increased self-service rates, improving the experience and the target users accomplishment, fastening the information delivery and even internal regulations correspondence enhancement.
What exact conclusion can be made out of plentitude of positive business and consumers signals? As rate of response time rises constantly.
Chatbots are ready to respond to a challenge being measured up to exacting standards: they are fast and 24/7 accessible, and they can give answers.
The times changed, and the chatbots are no more being the prerogative of the youngsters, they are being accepted by different age groups. Business can provide an actual high-class service using chatbots together with online chats.
Chatbots haven’t yet become a clear and present threat of employee termination, as by now they are not capable to give detailed answers to technical questions.
Along with than chatbots have an edge over mobile apps in numerous scripts: throughout feedback communication or even citizens petitions or complaints registration.
Surprisingly, not only the the 2017 positive prediction of a chatbot successful usage was verified in every detail, but also considerably surpassed analytics expectations Chatbots can become an effective remedy for retardation in business communication.
We hope BRN Chatbot Report 2018 was really useful as we are going to trace all the trend in chatbot business thereafter.
Take your chance to merge into the process: Start your own Chatbot Company with a Free White Label Version of BRAIN (revenue share model)
BRN.AI takes the charge of all the technical aspects of chatbots creaton, and your company will be able to introduce the result of our work to the clients as its own brand. If you start right now, your first demo chatbot is going to be ready in a couple of days. Your business won’t have any chance to disappear, as far not only we believe, but also we can prove, that you certainly gain success and HIGH EXIT using chatbots.
