The influence of virtual personal assistants

You may have heard of Cortana, which is Microsoft’s virtual personal assistant platform. It gained some fame in the summer of 2014 when, based on a mathematical model embedded within the platform, it predicted every game of the World Cup's knockout round correctly. (The knockout round of the World Cup is based on the top teams from the group stage. Because the matchups are determined quickly and only happen once with the winner advancing, they are typically harder to predict.)

Cortana’s predictive capabilities then turned its attention to the NFL and predicted 63% of regular-season games correctly last year.

At this point, you may wonder: this is all well and good if I’m planning to bet on some sporting events, but what does it have to do with field service management?

A lot, actually.

Cortana is, at base, a virtual personal assistant. You can dictate e-mails to it. It can lay out your whole day for you in the morning. Search terms, flight information, and news feeds are in sync on your phone, PC, or tablet. You can set location-based reminders that will ping you when you’re near a movie theater or flower shop, for example.

The goal here is obviously personal productivity, and this is important to remember. While technology has enabled gains in personal productivity, organizational productivity has been increasing only at a snail’s pace for the past decade. That disconnect occurs for several reasons, including our increasingly busy schedules and lack of ability to prioritize which of a dozen projects needs to be completed first.

Cortana and other virtual assistants help with this process. You can tier tasks in terms of priority, which can help make your field service organization more effective day to day.

But there’s obviously a human bias here: if you’re the one tiering the tasks, who is to say those are actually the tasks that deserve the highest priority?

Here’s the important next step.

Virtual assistants and other time-tracking and task-analyzing devices -- think of wearable technology like heart monitors -- are evolving to understand productivity and prioritization more effectively. Consider this from Harvard Business Review:

My calendar(s) should be telling me where—and how—I’ve been spending my most productive time at work and leisure. My calendar should flag my “Top 5 Time Wasters” in the next month. There should be graphics dynamically illustrating the three most significant “time shifts” in emphasis over the past 100, 365 and 1000 days.

That shift toward productivity analysis is already in existence for most virtual assistants, and more dynamic representations are on the way.

Think about your role within your field service organization. If you have a lot to manage and new business coming in, that’s great. But if you have been there for 5-10 years and seen an influx of new technology and new systems to make business more effective -- such as FSM management tools or a CRM -- do you also find yourself feeling more stressed and burnt out? Many field service managers we speak with do feel that way, which seems counterintuitive: shouldn’t all this technology be making us much more efficient in how we work? In 1930, famed economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030, we’d all be working 15 hours/week. It’s not yet 2030, but that prediction doesn’t seem likely.

Remember: technology is great and awe-inspiring on the surface, but the ultimate goal for the technologies you choose to apply to your business should be increased productivity. There are many ways to define productivity, but the most basic is: amount of value produced divided by the time or cost it took to do so. Businesses should always be looking to maximize time and cost, and virtual assistants will continue to help with this crucial equation.

We’ve put together an eBook on emergent technologies within field service -- from drones to self-driving cars to wearable technology to virtual reality -- with a focus on how all of them can eventually drive KPIs for your field service organization. After all, future technology is super cool to ruminate on -- but you still want to drive revenue growth with its use, right? Cortana and other assistants are a part of that equation. For more applications that could drive your business forward in the next few years and beyond, download our eBook.

Written by Shloma Baum