AI in the workplace: Future-proofing operations + benefits

Artificial intelligence in the workplace is here—and it’s here to stay. A whirlwind of new AI tools and capabilities is coming onto the market, with many directly impacting customer experience (CX) and employee service. According to the Zendesk AI-powered CX Report, a whopping 81 percent of customer experience leaders even agree that AI will change CX for the better.

As the future of work is already here, organizations need to be prepared to adjust quickly and think strategically about how they use AI, especially for customer data, personalization, and automation. Whether you’re a deep learning and machine learning expert or brand new to AI in the workplace, we’ll uncover its use cases, benefits, challenges, and real-life examples in this guide.

More in this guide:

• The rise of AI in the workplace
• How artificial intelligence is used in the workplace
• The benefits of AI in the workplace
• 3 examples of AI in the workplace
• Challenges of using artificial intelligence in the workplace
• Frequently asked questions
• Prepare for the future of AI in the workplace

The rise of AI in the workplace

Artificial intelligence is reshaping industries globally, from customer service and HR support to healthcare and finance. Using AI in the workplace to streamline workflows, enhance efficiency, and stay competitive in an evolving world is no longer an option but a necessity. And with the growth of generative and conversational AI, interactions with artificial intelligence are becoming more human-like as time goes on.

AI-powered tools are capable of automating tasks, analyzing vast datasets, and propelling innovation without driving up costs—especially in the realm of customer service. Plus, one of the biggest benefits of chatbots and other AI tools—like agent copilot—is that they allow human employees to do what they do best: be human.

According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report, 70 percent of customer experience leaders also plan to integrate generative AI into many touchpoints in the next two years. Faster, more comprehensive service is necessary for meeting growing employee and customer expectations, and AI is the modern solution for handling a growing volume of needs and demands.

How artificial intelligence is used in the workplace

In today’s world, companies are always looking for ways to do more with less without sacrificing quality. Below we’ve outlined a few of the common ways teams are using AI in the workplace to unify teams, break down information silos, and resolve complex or emotional tasks.

Deliver fast and personalized support with AI agents

Delivering high-quality, personalized interactions often comes with a steep price point—but it doesn’t have to. According to our CX Trends Report, 70 percent of CX leaders believe generative AI is making every digital customer interaction more efficient. Across industries and languages, AI agents are capable of serving customers without skyrocketing organizational costs.

AI agents are the next generation of AI-powered chatbots powered by generative AI. These advanced chatbots can sift through and draw information from a knowledge base while integrating with backend systems to push, pull, and parse data quickly. These capabilities enable AI agents to resolve complex queries autonomously. Plus, specialized tools like Facebook chatbots help companies meet customers where they are and deliver exceptionally personalized service.

Our CX Trends Report also states that a majority of CX leaders see chatbots becoming digital agents capable of tailoring interactions to fit customer journeys and boost agent intelligence in the process. Plus, AI agents can speed up support by autonomously resolving interactions from start to finish without sacrificing quality or increasing headcount.

Enhance self-service with AI-powered knowledge bases

According to our CX Trends Report, 15 percent of customers prefer to use self-service support options to find solutions for simple and common inquiries, so businesses need to invest in digital-first channels to consistently deliver exceptional CX.

AI-powered knowledge bases use artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) to process and surface relevant and accurate resources to users, promoting efficient solutions and customer independence.

For AI-powered CX, enhancing and optimizing self-service support is one of the top priorities of customer experience leaders today. Powerful knowledge base software utilizing AI tools analyzes customer intent and behavior to offer personalized resource recommendations and solutions based on their needs. Plus, intelligent bots and AI agents point customers toward full-length guides or FAQ pages—even after business hours.

Assist customer support agents

AI in the workplace is fundamentally changing the role of agents and admins. According to our AI-powered CX Report, 100 percent of customer service interactions will involve AI within three years. With tools like agent copilot, workplace AI—especially AI for customer service—enables teams to provide more accurate, targeted support to all customers.

For example, agent copilot can act as an intelligent assistant, suggesting contextually relevant responses and actions based on customer needs, or an independent agent, autonomously handling specific types of interactions without human intervention. Agent copilot also:

• Steers employees toward the next best action based on historical data.
• Alerts employees to areas for improvement through helpful tips and simple suggestions during interactions.
• Improves the quality of work by giving actionable insights and recommending optimizations.
• Automates employee onboarding processes by guiding workers through routine training and answering questions in real time.

This multi-mode functionality allows AI efficiency and human expertise to blend seamlessly, improving agent productivity like never before.

Automate workflows

Intelligent automation in the workplace combines artificial intelligence and automation technology to optimize productivity. With workflow automation software, teams can automate customer service, including:

• Ticket triage

• FAQ responses

• Task repetition

• Language translation

Teams can also use triggers to automatically use live chat canned responses or customer service response templates to answer inquiries based on customer intent or sentiment. Plus, our AI-powered CX Trends Report found that 86 percent of CX leaders believe AI agents will be equipped to handle questions of any complexity within three years, transforming CX agents into AI and automation managers across various customer support interactions.

Simplify strategy with AI analytics

To know your customers and employees, you need vast datasets. However, these can be difficult to analyze, especially when businesses acquire a constant stream of new data. Enter AI analytics: A type of data analysis using artificial intelligence to accurately and consistently analyze large amounts of information, including customer sentiment and experience metrics.

According to our 2024 CX Trends Report, 70 percent of organizations are actively investing in technologies and tools that automatically capture and analyze intent signals to help teams decide how and what to automate next. Plus, tracking customer service metrics and support KPIs helps businesses identify trends, patterns, and customer preferences to make data-driven decisions, simplifying strategy around resource allocation and organizational optimization.

Streamline customer service quality assurance

AI in customer service quality assurance (QA) automates the evaluation of customer interactions, identifying trends and areas for improvement across all exchanges. By investing in AI-powered QA solutions, teams can streamline compliance and expectation reviews—with 81 percent of CX leaders believing AI will significantly improve customer service quality, according to our CX Trends Report.

By creating a customer service QA program powered by AI, teams can focus strategic initiatives on providing actionable coaching and targeted training, ultimately enhancing overall customer satisfaction. Plus, customer support teams that invest in Zendesk QA consistently automate customer service quality assurance for 100 percent of support interactions, pinpointing problematic cases, mitigating churn risks, and identifying follow-up areas.

Improve workforce management

AI-powered workforce management (WFM) is an operational game changer. From accurate workforce forecasting to precise workforce scheduling, this type of WFM provides immediate insights into cost issues and efficiency opportunities. Our Zendesk CX Trends Report also found that 79 percent of organizations recognize the need for strategic agent management to optimize workforces, reduce wait times, and more.

Many businesses are employing workforce management solutions like Zendesk WFM to facilitate this type of management. With real-time and historic trend tracking and resource and staffing visibility, AI-powered WFM improves team productivity, decreases employee turnover, reduces manual or time-consuming scheduling tasks, and mitigates inefficiencies that slow growth.

The benefits of AI in the workplace

According to our AI-powered CX Report, 89 percent of CX leaders believe artificial intelligence will significantly benefit their business—and they’re right. The benefits of AI in the workplace—spanning across all industries—include:

• Reduced costs: Automating repetitive tasks and optimizing resource allocation helps companies schedule effectively, which reduces resource waste and minimizes expenses.
• Smarter scaling: AI analytics can help teams identify growth opportunities and predict customer needs, enabling teams to create high-value scaling initiatives focused on strategic expansion.
• Enhanced productivity and efficiency: AI-powered automation and workforce optimization improve team productivity by freeing up workers to focus on nuanced tasks, reducing errors, and streamlining workflows.
• Improved customer experience: Enhanced personalization, intelligent routing, and 24/7 support allow teams to deliver proactive solutions and respond to more customer inquiries.
• Refined training and development: AI tools collect data about knowledge gaps and individualized strengths and weaknesses, giving leaders a foundation for delivering actionable feedback and creating personalized employee development plans.
• Increased employee satisfaction: Investing in AI for employee experience allows teams to enhance skills, optimize onboarding, boost employee engagement, and prioritize collaboration, building more fulfilling work opportunities.
• Optimized performance: Data-driven insights from AI analytics help teams identify areas for improvement and predict potential roadblocks, empowering employees to create and deploy strategic operational initiatives.

For all businesses, including customer experience and employee service companies, these workplace benefits are invaluable to improving CX and providing exceptional experiences to all audiences.

3 examples of AI in the workplace

The ROI of using AI in the workplace is staggering—but don’t just take our word for it. Discover how Grove, Liberty, and Universal Store use artificial intelligence in the workplace to enhance operations, customer support, and more.

1. Grove: Improving operational efficiency

At Grove, a cleaning, wellness, and everyday essentials brand, AI in the workplace has drastically improved operational efficiency. Grove uses Zendesk AI to intelligently route tickets based on agent skill, capacity, status, and conversation priority, resolving an average of 68,000 tickets per month with only 25 human agents. This company also uses AI to manage, maintain, and optimize self-service support, increasing customer engagement and satisfaction.

2. Liberty: Delivering personalized service

Liberty London is an iconic U.K. premium department store retailer using AI in the workplace to personalize service experiences. With Zendesk AI, Liberty prioritizes personalization by offering omnichannel support across phone, chat, email, and WhatsApp and automating ticket classification to get inquiries to the right place efficiently.

Plus, Liberty uses AI tools to analyze customer intent and sentiment, providing insight into customer needs, which helps teams reduce bottlenecks across service operations.

3. Universal Store: Setting industry standards

Universal Store, a men’s and women’s fashion brand, is outpacing industry benchmarks and setting standards—all with the help of workplace AI. The company uses generative AI to create issue-specific responses to customer inquiries, speeding up response times while providing accurate and high-quality solutions.

Plus, Universal Store’s agents refine these generated responses, allowing teams to personalize them and maintain a customer satisfaction (CSAT) score of 92 percent.

Challenges of using artificial intelligence in the workplace

Implementing AI in the workplace will benefit businesses in the long run, but it can be difficult to get immediate buy-in from customers and employees alike. Transformation comes with obstacles, but there are already working solutions designed to tackle the following challenges head-on:

• Lack of human touch: According to our AI-powered CX Report, 81 percent of CX leaders believe maintaining a human touch while implementing artificial intelligence is the greatest challenge for businesses adopting AI solutions. With Zendesk, teams can automate repetitive tasks so complex inquiries that need nuanced assistance are routed to human agents faster.
• Security and privacy concerns: Information collection and use is essential to personalizing services, an essential feature of AI-powered technology. To keep information private and secure, Zendesk evaluates all collected data, only holds what’s necessary, and maintains high-level security certifications for protecting customer data.
• Cost increases: As companies grow, they require more complex and expensive workplace AI solutions to keep up with data collection and analysis. With a highly scalable solution, Zendesk tools are designed to grow with a company and pay for themselves over time, improving the ROI of customer service without increasing headcount.
• Industry complexity: Artificial intelligence is a complex technology that can be difficult to learn and use. As CX advances and the pace of change accelerates, choose a solution that’s purpose-built for CX—like Zendesk AI—understands the industry and has technical expertise on its side.
• Long implementation and training timelines: Some AI solutions may require a complex setup and a team of developers to get started. Zendesk, on the other hand, is an out-of-the-box solution that cuts implementation from days or weeks to minutes—with no technical experience required.

Every new advancement comes with its complexities. However, powerful solutions can help mitigate and prevent challenges associated with artificial intelligence in the workplace from eclipsing its very real benefits.

Frequently asked questions

Prepare for the future of AI in the workplace

Understanding the potential of AI in the workplace enables teams to drive innovation, enhance efficiency, and deliver exceptional customer experiences and employee service. As AI continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, businesses must embrace workplace transformation while onboarding new tools safely and efficiently.

For customer service teams, Zendesk AI helps unlock personalized, efficient support from day one. Built on billions of customer service interactions, our AI-powered solution improves CX by automating interactions, enhancing agent capabilities, streamlining workflows, and providing visibility into service operations.

Discover the benefits of using AI in the workplace with a Zendesk free trial today.