Reclaim Our Focus and Unlock New Business Potential With AI
- By Doreen Tan, Dropbox
- January 29, 2024
The accessibility of technology has significantly transformed the way we live and work. With this, our hyperconnected digital societies have also ushered in a whole new level of distractions, from email alerts to text messages and social media notifications. This is especially pertinent in countries like Singapore, where the digital economy accounts for more than 17% of the city's GDP and boasts a 94% technology adoption rate among businesses.
With many online platforms demanding our attention, it is all too easy for the modern worker to lose focus. This not only results in wasted time but also wasted potential. According to a new Economist Impact study, APAC markets such as Japan, Korea, and Australia see a 34-44% potential gain in employees' economic contribution simply due to optimizing focus time. To regain these lost capacities, businesses must help employees find better ways to sustain attention toward their tasks and filter out their digital cacophonies.
Over the past few months, we have seen Artificial Intelligence (AI) reshape the operations of many industries. Likewise, it plays a pivotal role in ushering in a new future of work where individuals and teams are empowered to find better flow and focus and ultimately bring their best selves and work to the table.
Filtering out the noise
A large majority of jobs today involve a variety of communication channels, such as emails, virtual meetings, workspace chat applications and online documents. In fact, employees often face a cognitive burden of work about work, where the effort to manage work processes across multiple channels is a feat in itself. In the same study by the Economist Impact, 60% of respondents said that chat applications and other collaboration tools pressured them to respond quickly to incoming messages, and 63% felt they had to always be available. Uncannily, the very tools that were made to make work easier can also be a source of distraction and stress.
While it is impossible to eliminate every interruption, organizations can embrace new tools that clear up the virtual workspace and declutter the distracted mind. For example, workspace features embedded with AI can intelligently extract information from large documents, summarize them without employees needing to parse through the whole file, and even automatically generate transcripts of meeting videos. This helps workers get straight to the important information, reducing the need for noise and freeing up time from unnecessary meetings or messages. AI workspace tools can enhance the quality of knowledge work by creating a simplified way of working, providing the headspace for higher-level thinking and reserving online team interactions for genuine, enriching collaboration.
Directing attention with intention
With the consumerization of generative AI and GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformers) chatbots, many knowledge workers today expect AI to drive more intelligent and intuitive work processes, beyond its growing impact in business functions such as customer services, marketing and sales. Nearly 75% of knowledge workers noticed an improvement in the quality of their work and time spent on repetitive tasks after adopting automation tools—which also consist of AI—for assistance.
AI tools help employees better organize and manage their digital workloads and enable them to actively funnel and sustain attention toward their working material. For example, employees can leverage an AI-powered universal search to answer questions and glean insights from their company's content database while quickly locating the best resources for their ongoing tasks. Employee focus can be further bolstered by company practices that adopt an async-by-default mindset, which encourages teams to solve problems over quick collaboration tools before reflexively scheduling meetings.
This enables a way of working where every action is highly purposeful and intentional, instead of mindless and scattered actions such as toggling between platforms in search of documents and meeting links. AI empowers employees to engage deeply with their work and creates a fruitful work environment where they can stay focused on their daily objectives and goals, regardless of whether they are working remotely or on-site.
Encouraging a thoughtful implementation of AI
The versatility of AI also lies in its capacity to personalize workflows for every individual. Powered by machine learning, AI work tools often learn, evolve and improve the more they are used. This means that the benefits of intelligent workspaces increase over time as they can register and adapt to the unique patterns of the user. Using AI in this way allows employees to achieve what they usually cannot do on their own— orienting their workspace from the inside out and making work work for them.
The exponential growth of AI this year presents an opportune moment to incorporate it into our workflows and supercharge our ways of working. With more than half of Singapore CEOs shifting capital investments towards skilling their workforce for an AI-driven future, business leaders can take the first step by implementing AI-driven solutions internally. This can help employees maximize time, energy and focus.
Maintaining focus and flow has never been more crucial for the modern worker in a digital age of constant online stimulus. With the normalization of remote work, the challenge is no longer where but how we work. To reap the benefits of Singapore's AI and digitally-savvy workforce, this emerging technology represents an opportunity for businesses to redefine the future of work by helping knowledge workers make the most meaningful use of their time while enabling enterprises to effectively stay at the forefront of new innovations and disruptions.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends. Image credit: iStockphoto/Tzido
Doreen Tan, Dropbox
Doreen Tan is the head of Asia for Dropbox. She has over 20 years of enterprise tech experience and is passionate about developing top talent through skill enhancement, coaching, and mentoring.