Over the past 40 years 80% of the Fortune 500 companies have died, don’t be next.
Incredibly, over the past 40 years 80% of the Fortune 500 companies have died but one company, Bridgewater Associates, has managed to not only survive but thrive and there are some important lessons to take away from its founder
Bridgewater Associates, created by Ray Dalio an American billionaire investor and hedge fund manager, was listed as the largest hedge fund in the world in 2013. Today Bridgewater manages roughly $150 billion of funds.
Dalio, the ‘Steve Jobs’ of investing, is one of the richest people in the world. He is the author of the uber frank 2017 New York Times best seller Principles: Life & Work. When he speaks the world listens.
In his award-winning masterpiece ‘Principles’ once wrote ‘computer coding will become as essential as writing. In time we will use machine assistants as much for decision making as we do for information gathering’.
Dalio went on to suggest ‘As these machines help us, they will learn about what we like – what we value, what our strengths and weaknesses are-and they will be able to tailor the advice they give us by automatically seeking out the help of others who are strong where we are weak. It won’t be long before our machine assistants are speaking to other’s machine assistants and collaborating in this way. In fact, that’s beginning to happen already.’
Dalio imagined a world in which you can ‘use technology to connect to a system in which you can input the issue you’re dealing with and have exchanges about what you should do and why with the highest-rated thinkers in the world…These innovations will help people … unlock an incredibly powerful form of collective thinking.’
Whilst Dalio was thinking of tomorrow, today that world already exists. Companies can now deploy their own human-like digital employees to perform mundane work leveraging cognitive technologies.
An intelligent work assistant is software that can perform a wide variety of tasks or services for employees based on commands or questions. For example, voice assistants or chatbots are able to interpret human speech and respond via synthesized voices. In fact, there are an estimated 157 million smart speakers in the US (NPR/Edison Research). These have been so successful, that it is predicted that in the near future every household will have a smart speaker.
Most CEOs hire a personal assistant to help them with a wide variety of essential tasks e.g., handling email and calendars, booking flights, organising events.
Now imagine a workplace where everyone has a smart digital work assistant that is capable of so much more than telling you the weather or giving you a roundup of the news? Imagine a world in which everyone has a digital work assistant that can do so much more. Imagine a world in which every employee will benefit from an easy-to-use smart digital work assistant that makes an impact on their work and lives every day. Imagine a world in which work assistant learns and gets smarter the more we teach and distribute knowledge?
Well, this is actually already possible. In fact, it’s possible to automate tasks and processes most are not even aware of. Tomorrow’s technology is truly already here.
Employees are a company’s most powerful asset. They are critical to every business’s success yet they often struggle for time to complete tasks as they are stuck working on routine, mundane, repetitive, robotic work.
When they are stuck on the mundane, they struggle to find the time and information they need to complete value-adding work that challenges and engages them.
Employees are keen to be enabled to digitize the mundane away. They understand the problems their executive teams talk about as they get to see, hear and experience those problems every day.
They want to innovate and create solutions to those problems to remove the pain that they, their colleagues and their customers experience every working day.
Digital work assistants augment/enable global organizations employees, with AI powered assistance and automation, to support and deliver superior better customer and employee experiences.
And so many more processes can be automated than most people are aware of. According to McKinsey, 60% of manual work is automatable today. So, think about how much of your manual work is automated today?
Whilst RPA or chatbots alone are insufficient to digitally transform work; their combination with digital assistant technology enables firms and individuals to finally succeed where they have failed before.
With 54% of all workforce needing to be reskilled to address a global skills gap (World Economic Forum) there had never been a more opportune time for this to happen. Employees and their companies can now develop, and use, digital work assistants to finally benefit from true low-code AI and digital enablement capabilities as was promised many years ago.