The Digital Agent and the one that came to my Uncle's wedding

The friendly neighborhood all weather friend

We saw him on all the special family occasions including my Uncle's wedding although I didn’t really know who he was. But he seemed to be always there. We were in a city where everybody knew everyone, something that’s a rarity these days in the big city hustle. It was much later that I got to know, that he was their financial advisor and my parents trusted him deeply. They still do.

It’s fascinating and endearing at the same time how effective he is in terms of cross sell, up sell, 360-degree servicing needs, onboarding, and all the possible client experience journeys that my folks seem to embark on with him, despite my 'wise' counsel at times! His embedded value seems way higher than the modern, data modeled and engineering automation driven, digitally enabled, smart financial assistants – well, at least for my parents. I think at the heart of it, is this deep faith that he has created and the service orientation of the friendly neighborhood good man, who may not have the sophisticated smarts but more than makes up for it with his gentle, understated availability at all times and bespoke support.

And yet in the last 10 years, specially the last 3 years, there has been a tremendous evolution of the Digital servicing and the Tech driven transformation across industries, specially the financial services. The changing demographics, the social constructs, the pandemic challenges, the cost margin pressures, the effectiveness, power and genius of the platform based technologies and the rise of the new age Tech companies, specially along with an enterprising start-up ecosystem - has all been pointing in a direction of the 'Digital Agent'. ???

The accelerated Digital race to Transform and the Intelligent Automation promise

It's well documented that the pandemic challenges accelerated the already increasing investments in digital transformation and technology processes to keep pace with the changing demands. The desire for traditional businesses to emulate the success of Tech companies like Netflix, Google, Amazon, Meta etc, and wanting to be 'Digital companies' selling a particular product, is not a misplaced vision and has created some very positive experimentation and changes.

The 'two in a box' reference brought in by bright consultants bringing Business and Technology teams closer than ever before or even 'all in a box' in some cases. It is a very collaborative and possibly complete way of looking at leveraging technology to solve business problems. And of course, the tech evolution has simply been mind blowing with limitless possibilities of automating base level data entry and middle level, rule based processes. With the business operations teams working to find their true potential on more knowledge oriented, cognitive, decision based, high impact and higher value, processes and interactions.

And the good thing is, at least in theory and hopefully in practice - most companies are realizing the value of client experience through the journey, the need to focus on process designs through the interfaces, while leveraging deep tech and wonderful tech platform options, available today.

The beauty is the 'art of possible solutions' is not 'one size fits all' - it ranges from complex, comprehensive platforms which challenge the entire organizations product life cycle, and systems thinking to more democratic 'low code, no code' citizen development solutions empowering business operations teams; from the now pretty much common place Robotic solutions that leaves a bit of Tech debt to the more comprehensive Intelligent AI/ ML solutions; from OCR/ICR to the more effective 'computer vision' solutions - it is indeed across the whole spectrum of the Technology hierarchy of automation or Digitization solutions, that we can chose from today, to solve a business problem, with its relative cost benefit and gaps.

However, the key question that we all need to ask and be conscious of, is how do we get the balance between the 'brilliance of Tech' and 'the humanism' that clients need, so that the modern 'renaissance' of corporations is truly centered towards the people who buy our products and services, and really the reason we exist or will continue to exist.

The Technology and Human Jenga

'Jenga', derived from the Swahili word Kujenga means “to build”, represents more than just a tower of building blocks

** ( Reference - the Jenga Metaphor - Enlightened.com)

Its a fascinating game - Jenga. The decision to deconstruct a wooden tower and which block to remove, without disturbing it, is a tough one. One bad move and it can all come crashing down. Likewise, what we add to our construct and what we chose to leave behind, will define the structural integrity of our client's experience and validation of our products.

One of my wonderful bosses had once told me about ten years back that the future of Operations is Techno-Ops and the managers in business operations can't be one dimensional. Future managers will need to speak technology, will need to understand and embrace it. Today, I get that more than ever before and yet the value of 'Service' or 'Seva' ( Seva?comes from the Sanskrit root?sev- which means 'to serve' selflessly) is the larger context that inspires, and one that I hope always drives our choices.

The challenge is also to continue the value of human assistance and at times even human led, in client journeys while using technology smarts to remove the inefficiencies and yet not be insensitive to bespoke client needs and ignore the pitfalls of the unemotional but intelligent Digital agent.

The key choice in the client experience and product design construct that we should disproportionately fuss about, and one which should be made every single time - from a clients perspective not just from a cost perspective - is to chose the relative value between, a 'human led and tech assisted' experience or a 'tech led, but human assisted' one.

And, as the great Theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author Stephen Hawking once said - "Most of the threats we face come from the progress we've made in science and technology. We are not going to stop making progress, or reverse it, so we must recognize the dangers and control them.

I'm an optimist, and I believe we can."