Employees turn to chatbots post pandemic: Over 40% increase in AI-driven chatbot queries

With the emergence of work-from-home and distributed models this year, organisations are witnessing an increased interest in artificial intelligence (AI) powered conversational chatbots. While these chatbots were primarily used for automating interactions with customers and partners, this year, they have been used to automate employee helpdesks as well. With leave, attendance, payroll, and employment details setting the bar with higher volumes, there has been a tactical shift in employees’ interest towards newer AI-chatbot offerings like health and wellbeing, conversation enabled meetings, performance, remote knowledge repository access.

As per the latest report by PeopleStrong Alt HR Tech Insights, with a 100 per cent uptick witnessed in Health and performance-related queries, employees are trusting AI chatbots to guide them through these unprecedented times. As employees continued to work remotely, industries with distributed workforce came out as the most avid users of conversational AI chatbots with BFSI, retail, pharma, and IT industries witnessing an increase in the range of 30-40 per cent for HR centric queries after the nation-wide lockdown.

The month of April saw a massive jump in total employee questions reflecting an increasing reliance on technology to get answers adjusting to the new normal. Entry-level employees accounted for almost 50 per cent of overall queries searching answers for fundamentals topics regarding policy amendments in leaves, payroll, and attendance management whereas the senior management queries focussed on employee performance, accessing documents for sales presentations, reports, and initiating automated zoom or MS teams meetings.

Vipul Mathur, (VP Sales, PeopleStrong) said, “We are now witnessing a higher focus on leveraging technology as an enabler for employee interactions. Also, employees across all industries are getting familiar with conversational AI-chatbots which provide personalized inputs, quick turnarounds, and access to the entire HR functions at their fingertips. We can picture AI-chatbot to become one of the core features of an HR platform in a post-pandemic world.”

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