Integration Of Software Robots Into The Office Environment

Enterprise employees began to give software programs a personality, give them female names, talk to them, and even give up window seats. Employees with flesh and blood are adjusting to sharing offices with robots.

As artificial intelligence (AI) invades the workplace, people begin to learn to live with new robot colleagues, even if their own jobs may be laid off next time.

Employees of ANZ Bank's back office in Bangalore, India gave their new colleagues a softer female name, such as Lakshmi; and employees of Nippon Life Insurance called them It is "robomi-chan". In London, employees of insurance processing company Xchanging named one of their robots Poppy.

"I heard about Dani and Laxmi," said Pankamam Sridevi, managing director of ANZ. "They talk to them, they are like people. Sometimes people I like them so much and even give them a window seat."

Using technology to perform information processing tasks is not new. But the latest manifestation of office automation — software robots performing tasks that human employees have done on their PCs — makes it easy to be personalized.

These robots work 24 hours a day without making mistakes, and their developers claim that they can bear the workload of two or three people.

Alastair Bathgate, CEO of Blue Prism, one of these software development companies, said that among employees who find themselves working with new programs, the new robots are named and given their personality The phenomenon has become very common. Azerbaijan’s Cedric said that naming the robot helped the workers accept the software and reduced the risk of the robot being regarded as a job destroyer.

The urge to name robots at least confirms a familiar pattern: giving female personality to new "smart" software assistants such as Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's "Cortana". Only Apple's Siri provides an optional male voice among similar products dominated by female voices.

Entrepreneurs, such as Chrissie Lightfoot, co-founder of Robot Lawyer Lisa, have no doubt that it is wise to give robots a female personality.