The personal greeting on websites is becoming a more common tool and often is the first interaction a user has with a business and therefore can be a vital influence in understanding how customers are treated at this particular business. Quite often, it will be a chatbot or a digital assistant providing this service, rather than an actual human.

Digital assistants are text-based platforms that are created to work within a single purpose application. Services are continuing to improve algorithms based on user behaviour and language conversion to enhance digital assistant development and improve the overall user experience. Many industry leaders believe that digital assistants will have a great influence on the way financial professionals operator. Digital assistants can enable finance teams to simplify and automate certain repetitive tasks, enabling finance professionals to spend more time on value-focused activities.

Technology businesses are integrating voice assistant into software support with processes such as recommending suppliers, completing expense reports and providing support on which invoices to pay first. Oracle is implementing innovative digital assistants into a product to assist in capturing and monitoring expenses, claims and generate useful algorithms that recommend the most suitable suppliers to engage with.

Automation to enhance business efficiency

Oracle believes that digital assistants will begin to support improvements to year end, budget management and financial forecasting. Businesses will start to use intelligent assistants to remove duties previously performed by employees, enabling teams to use their skills to develop insights and create more informed business decisions. A fine example of digital assistants in action is at Exelon who implement digital assistant to create a rapid customer service experience. Exelon was looking for quick digital assistant implementation to cover a number of platforms that include web, social media and voice assistants like Alexa. Exelon utilised the rapid digital assistant tools from Oracle Mobile Cloud and created faster response times, reduced costs due to lower call centre expenses and over 10 million users covered via the service.

In the finance industry, digital assistants can offer similar functions to automate and cover repetitive processes that are generally time-consuming for employees, time that could be used to focus on high-level jobs that influence the financial performance of a business. Digital assistants will potentially provide informed answers to specific questions such as ‘annual spend on travel and expenses’. Information like this can allow a financial manager to determine how much budget is available for employee spend.

Industry leaders believe that digital assistants will soon be able to automate complete financial processes, eliminating the need for human involvement. Financial employees will be given more freedom from repetitive jobs and the ability to spend more time on the critical and necessary work. This means more benefits in terms of a business and its financial strategy as well as keeping employees more engaged and challenged at work. Innovative digital assistants are likely to be a vital part of empowering employees and enhancing business performance.