By Vara Kumar, Co-founder, and Head of R&D and Pre-Sales, Whatfix
Enterprises are increasingly grappling with the challenge of ensuring their software users can effectively master the growing number of applications needed daily to do their jobs effectively. The rapid expansion and complexity of technology have led to steep learning curves, often exacerbated by inadequate guidance and training by companies. This gap prevents users from fully embracing technology and maximizing the tools at their disposal.
Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) offer the potential to establish a more streamlined, user-focused digital workplace where employees can efficiently harness technology. DAPs seamlessly layer on top of any application to guide users with real-time guidance, self-help support, and user feedback. When combined with analytics to identify users’ friction points at scale, DAPs pave a data-driven path to success for digital transformation.
AI-powered DAPs
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is reshaping our vision of the future, and holds immense promise for bolstering the global economy. Per a recent PwC study, AI is projected to contribute more to the world economy than the combined output of India and China by 2030.
As AI continues to evolve, these advancements will enable more personalised and proactive user guidance, allowing platforms to adapt to individual needs and preferences in real-time.
AI-enabled DAPs elevate this functionality by enhancing user productivity across business processes while offering a superior user experience for end-users. These AI tools deliver more userised experiences, automate complex processes, and prioritise tasks for greater efficiency. new AI-enabled feature can streamline the process of extracting, organising, and synthesizing key themes, significantly accelerating information discovery by up to 80 percent. The powerful combination of a DAP with AI drives the efficiency needed to make a tangible impact on a business with the potential to increase sales, lower costs, and mitigate risks through more rapid data analysis.
Taming complexity with user-centric technology
According to Gartner, fostering digital dexterity—the capacity to adeptly utilise and adapt to digital tools—is crucial for organisations seeking scalability and growth. An effective digital employee experience means enhanced productivity.
Many IT leaders are transforming user support with a core belief in the “userisation” of software, which focuses on making technology more user-savvy, rather than expecting users to be tech-savvy. This userisation concept enables organisations to improve individual user experiences while increasing workforce efficiency. For users, DAP & generative AI (GenAI) simplify, and streamline technology experience, while businesses benefit from improved process standardisation and higher user productivity.
DAPs lay a powerful foundation for driving software adoption and productivity across the enterprise. The introduction of GenAI amplifies the capabilities that can supercharge DAPs, providing more personalised, contextualised, and adaptive user experiences.
By integrating AI-powered DAPs, organisations can customise guidance, documentation, and workflows based on individual users’ needs, roles, experience levels, and behavior patterns. This creates a tailored experience aligned to how each person best understands and utilises applications. Additionally, natural language processing powered by AI enables more intuitive voice and text interactions, where users can simply ask questions plainly and receive relevant information, analytics, and step-by-step guides generated on the fly.
GenAI revolutionises DAPs by tapping into an organisation’s data repositories to deliver precise answers to users’ specific questions, synthesising internal knowledge seamlessly. It also automates the creation of customised training content, such as guides and documentation, by analysing user cohorts’ application usage patterns, thereby reducing manual effort.
AI-driven DAPs can proactively present contextual information and guidance when a user may need assistance with a task or workflow. This abstracts away complexity, empowering non-technical employees to be productive with new software by lowering learning curves and minimising frustrations from unfamiliarity. Users can simply state what they need to accomplish, and the AI guides them through it seamlessly without the deep technical knowledge required. AI supercharges the capabilities of DAPs, offering more personalised, integrated, and intelligent user experiences that accelerate software adoption and productivity across the workforce.
Mitigating digital friction & reinforcing human AI controls
A robust GenAI strategy requires a large language model supplemented with enterprise-specific information to ensure that the AI predictions, recommendations, and outputs are personalised and contextual to the enterprise’s specific processes and policies and the user’s role.
As we make more progress with AI and userisation, it is important to adopt a “pro-human” approach to producing responsible AI. Addressing concerns around data privacy, security, and unbiased outputs is critical.
Effective solutions involve human-in-the-middle validation mechanisms, transparency about AI-generated content, and siloed training data for individual organisations, ensuring compliance with regulations and preventing unintended biases. While IT business and stakeholders should oversee the AI implementation, users should retain autonomy over their AI-generated outputs. Additionally, internal IT staff and learning and development teams can enhance AI models with contextual information and act as safeguards against factual inaccuracies or biased outputs..
The AI Revolution in Business Applications
Markham Neil Bathew, Senior Manager of Global Sales Enablement at Wipro, highlights that the objective of userisation should be to facilitate “self-service” functionality to greatly enhance the digital employee experience. By deploying Whatfix’s DAP to improve its change management processes, Wipro has achieved notable advancements. He notes, “People are not always aware of some of the features that are already enabled in the system and hence, they’re not using it. That’s really one of the challenges. We’ve been able to introduce tool tips and user flows for guided navigation. These are some of the features we have been able to use, and they’ve helped people get the kind of support they need at the right time.”
The true potential of AI-powered DAPs lies in abstracting user interfaces altogether. The vision is to eliminate the complexities of visual elements or application layers. Instead, AI agents will understand user intents and seamlessly execute required tasks, making software more accessible and reducing the cognitive load on the workforce. The synergy between AI and digital adoption platforms promises continuous optimisation, enhanced employee training and enablement, scalable personalised experiences, and deeper analytics capabilities – all converging to boost workforce productivity, maximise software ROI, and drive transformative business outcomes for enterprises.
The synergistic power of DAPs and generative AI is creating a new era of workplace efficiency and effectiveness.
