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Though three-quarters of U.S. employers now offer hybrid work, some retailers have been slow to embrace emerging hybrid work models, even for corporate employees. We spoke with Ashok Krish, Global Head of Digital Workplace at TCS, about how hybrid work will impact employers – and their employees – in the retail industry.

Do you believe hybrid work is here to stay?

Hybrid work is absolutely here to stay. While retail has always had a sizeable frontline workforce, there has always been an asymmetry in technology investments. Knowledge workers in a traditional office setting have historically been more invested in technology than frontline workers. But the pandemic has forced a rethink. Digital enabled frontline workers are more crucial to the organization’s long-term success than ever before.

How will hybrid work change the employee experience in the retail industry?

In the context of retail, where one might argue that a hybrid model of work has always existed (frontline workers vs. knowledge workers), the transition required now is more subtle. The focus now is on technology investments that allow more fluidity between frontline and knowledge work and slowly blur the distinction between these roles. Retailers that invest in workplace technologies that allow anyone in any role to work effectively in both a frontline as well as a traditional office/home capacity will succeed.

Empowering frontline workers with better real-time analytics, decision support, and devices that help them spend less time doing boring, repetitive work is a crucial investment for retailers to make.

What are some of the challenges hybrid work poses for employers in the retail sector?

One of the biggest challenges hybrid work poses for retail is churn. Retailers employ a large number of transient/temporary workers who need to be onboarded and offboarded rapidly, while enabling others’ contextual knowledge to be delivered to them and simultaneously capturing their tacit knowledge while they are working. This means that traditional ways of managing knowledge and enabling collaboration simply do not scale for this workforce. The investment in AI-backed continuous skilling and just-in-time training experiences for frontline workers will be crucial in overcoming this particular challenge.

Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that 48% of employees and 53% of managers say they are burned out at work. What can employers do to improve employee engagement and reduce stress in the hybrid workplace?

Employers need to rethink the rituals of work. Retail organizations need to rethink how their frontline workers collaborate in real time with the rest of the organization. Employees waste time finding information, finding people, setting up meetings, and cleaning data. Everyone spends more time looking for information than acting on information. It’s a discouraging, stressful environment. To change it, managers must transform their processes and their culture. They must embrace new technology stack metaphors (such as Microsoft Teams vs. email) to become more efficient. They must learn to become effective facilitators of digital processes and distributed teams.

How can retail organizations use technology to improve communication, collaboration, and productivity, while maintaining security and preventing fraud?

Companies can no longer expect employees to attend town hall meetings and read company newsletters. Technology can help them target the right messages to the right demographic in the right form factors. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to reduce a 900-word report to a 50-word summary or generate a video, which you can send on a mobile phone.

Tools like Microsoft Teams break down silos and enable collaboration across the organization. Once managers set access controls, the platform worries about security, freeing people to exchange ideas without constraint. But at the same time, the design and configuration of these collaboration systems will make the difference between creating a noisy, unproductive culture of collaboration and a personable, productive one.

Automation, AI, and the cloud can save employees tremendous amounts of time. Instead of attending two-week training sessions, employees can receive nudges from a virtual assistant to acquire new skills as they work. In the near future, knowledge assistants powered by large language models, purpose-built for specific industry domains, will augment every employee’s productivity by providing contextual knowledge on demand.

Retail companies have historically been early adopters of technology and will need to continue to increase their momentum of change. The traditional dichotomy between build vs. buy has given way to a “no-code vs. pro-code” approach – employees will expect new capabilities to delivered quicker than ever before.

With cloud-based software, front-line employees can see back-end customer information in real time, increasing upselling, cross-selling, and client satisfaction. Bringing business tools into the flow of collaboration will create more frictionless experiences and enable more agile collective decision-making.

These capabilities can help to eliminate workplace pain points, greatly improving the employee experience. Without a great employee experience, you cannot create a great customer experience.

At the same time, companies must maintain secure environments and prevent fraud. Companies must invest in newer tools that give them wider and deeper visibility into their threat landscape and leverage built-in AI and machine learning to proactively manage threats and reduce alert fatigue. The future of security is to largely automate responses to standard threats while investing in education and change management to prevent social engineering and attacks on individuals.

How does TCS help organizations reimagine the future of work for their employees?

We provide a comprehensive solution combining infrastructure, applications, and human resources expertise into a single package that helps retail organizations deliver an outstanding hybrid work experience. My group includes people who do everything from designing applications to mapping workflows to managing the inner workings of a cloud framework, including reinventing productivity and the future of work with AI using Microsoft 365 Copilot.

TCS also invests in behavioral science research to help organizations prepare for the workplace of the future. How can retail companies accommodate gig work? How should AI collaborate with human beings? No one knows the answers to these questions yet, just as no one knew until recently how to manage hybrid work. By peering into cutting-edge technology, we can pass along insights that keep our clients ahead of the curve.

Discover how you can transform meeting culture, help managers to be more effective, and drive employee engagement.

Tata Consultancy Services

Ashok Krish Global Head of Digital Workplace, TCS
Ashok Krish is the Global Head of the Digital Workplace unit at TCS, which helps customers reimagine the future of work for their employees. His team works at the intersection of design, technology, and behavioral science, and helps conceptualize and implement modern, persuasive, and immersive employee experiences. Outside of work, he is a columnist, musician, and a food science enthusiast.

Employee Experience, Remote Work, Retail Industry

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Chatbots have been maturing steadily for years. In 2022, however, they showed that they’re ready to take a giant leap forward.

When ChatGPT was unveiled a few short weeks ago, the tech world was abuzz about it. The New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose called it “quite simply, the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public,” and social media was flooded with examples of its ability to crank out convincingly human-like prose.[1] Some venture capitalists even went so far as to say that its launch may be as earth shattering as the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.[2]

ChatGPT does indeed look like it represents a major step forward for artificial intelligence (AI) technology. But, as many users were quick to discover, it’s still marked by many flaws — some of them serious. Its advent signals not just a watershed moment for AI development, but an urgent call to reckon with a future that’s arriving more quickly than many expected.

Fundamentally, ChatGPT brings a new sense of urgency to the question: How can we develop and use this technology responsibly? Contact centers can’t answer this question on their own, but they do have a specific part to play.

ChatGPT: what’s all the hype about?

Answering that question first requires an understanding of just what ChatGPT is and what it represents. The technology is the brainchild of OpenAI, the San Francisco-based AI company that also released innovative image generator DALL-E 2 earlier this year. It was released to the public on Nov. 30, 2022, and quickly gained steam, reaching 1 million users within five days.

The bot’s capabilities stunned even Elon Musk, who originally co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman. He echoed the sentiment of many people when he called ChatGPT’s language processing “scary good.”[3]

So, why all the hype? Is ChatGPT really that much better than any chatbot that’s come before? In many ways, it seems the answer is yes.

The bot’s knowledge base and language processing capabilities far outpace other technology on the market. It can churn out quick, essay-length answers to seemingly innumerable queries, covering a vast range of subjects and even answering in varied styles of prose based on user inputs. You can ask it to write a resignation letter in a formal style or craft a quick poem about your pet. It churns out academic essays with ease, and its prose is convincing and, in many cases, accurate. In the weeks after its launch, Twitter was flooded with examples of ChatGPT answering every type of question users could conceive of.

The technology is, as Roose points out, “Smarter. Weirder. More flexible.” It may truly usher in a sea of change in conversational AI.[1]

A wolf in sheep’s clothing: the dangers of veiled misinformation 

For all its impressive features, though, ChatGPT still showcases many of the same flaws that have become familiar in AI technology. In such a powerful package, however, these flaws seem more ominous.

Early users reported a host of concerning issues with the technology. For instance, like other chatbots, it quickly learned the biases of its users. Before long, ChatGPT was spouting offensive comments that women in lab coats were probably just janitors, or that only Asian or white men make good scientists. Despite the system’s reported guardrails, users were able to train it to make these types of biased responses fairly quickly.[4]

More concerning about ChatGPT, however, are its human-like qualities, which make its answers all the more convincing. Samantha Delouya, a journalist for Business Insider, asked it to write a story she’d already written — and was shocked by the results.

On the one hand, the resulting piece of “journalism” was remarkably on point and accurate, albeit somewhat predictable. In less than 10 seconds, it produced a 200-word article fairly similar to something Delouya may have written, so much so that she called it “alarmingly convincing.” The catch, however, was that the article contained fake quotes made up by ChatGPT. Delouya spotted them easily, but an unsuspecting reader may not have.[3]

Therein lies the rub with this type of technology. Its mission is to produce content and conversation that’s convincingly human, not necessarily to tell the truth. And that opens up frightening new possibilities for misinformation and — in the hands of nefarious users — more effective disinformation campaigns.

What are the implications, political and otherwise, of a chatbot this powerful? It’s hard to say — and that’s what’s scary. In recent years, we’ve already seen how easily misinformation can spread, not to mention the damage it can do. What happens if a chatbot can mislead more efficiently and convincingly?

AI can’t be left to its own devices: the testing solution

Like many reading the headlines about ChatGPT, contact center executives may be wide-eyed about the possibilities of deploying this advanced level of AI for their chatbot solutions. But they first must grapple with these questions and craft a plan for using this technology responsibly.

Careful use of ChatGPT — or whatever technology comes after it — is not a one-dimensional problem. No single actor can solve it alone, and it ultimately comes down to an array of questions involving not only developers and users but also public policy and governance. Still, all players should seek to do their part, and for contact centers, that means focusing on testing.

The surest pathway to chaos is to simply leave chatbots alone to work out every user question on their own without any human guidance. As we’ve already seen with even the most advanced form of this technology, that doesn’t always end well.

Instead, contact centers deploying increasingly advanced chatbot solutions must commit to regular, automated testing to expose any flaws and issues as they arise and before they snowball into bigger problems. Whether they’re simple customer experience (CX) defects or more dramatic information errors, you need to discover them early in order to correct the problem and retrain your bot.

Cyara Botium is designed to help contact centers keep chatbots in check. As a comprehensive chatbot testing solution, Botium can perform automated tests for natural language processing (NLP) scores, conversation flows, security issues, and overall performance. It’s not the only component in a complete plan for responsible chatbot use, but it’s a critical one that no contact center can afford to ignore.

Learn more about how Botium’s powerful chatbot testing solutions can help you keep your chatbots in check and reach out today to set up a demo.

[1] Kevin Roose, The Brilliance and Weirdness of ChatGPT, The New York Times, 12/5/2022.

[2] CNBC. “Why tech insiders are so excited about ChatGPT, a chatbot that answers questions and writes essays.”

[3] Business Insider. “I asked ChatGPT to do my work and write an Insider article for me. It quickly generated an alarmingly convincing article filled with misinformation.”

[4] Bloomberg. “OpenAI Chatbot Spits Out Biased Musings, Despite Guardrails.”

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning