Conversation functionality is also gaining ground at companies, with the use of a range of in-house chatbots. These smart agents and assistants are already automating a number of tasks in the HR sphere, such as booking leave and working out how much overtime pay an employee is owed, as Jackson – a bot developed by Paris-based digital transformation agency Daveo – does.

Cyril Harpoutlian, an Associate Director at Daveo, sees in this new type of channel a means of attracting and retaining young talented people, pointing out: "Staff want the same level of interaction with their employer as they have with Amazon or Siri." He has been inspired by the 'one click' concept popularised by the e-commerce giant to make all operations as simple as possible.

"[Chatbot is] a means of attracting and retaining young talented people..."

Daveo is now planning to move on from HR to address all company processes, starting with the expenses approval circuit."Staff want the same level of interaction with their employer as they have with Amazon or Siri."But with the recent advances in artificial intelligence, chatbots will not be restricted to automating easily-modelled procedures. "Chatbots also allow access to company data," underlines Benjamin Thomas, innovation consultant at French business digital transformation firm SQLI. "A salesperson will ask for the sales figures for the month of October. As a next step, the chatbot will then be able to give him/her the reason why sales were lower on a given day." And in the digital workplace, these smart agents will also be able to keep the promises made for wikis ten or fifteen years ago. He argues: "Wikis were supposed to gather together all the company's knowledge, except that nobody could be bothered to add to the knowledge base." However, this is precisely what Slack chat assistant Niles does automatically. Niles 'listens' to employees' conversations and stores the answers to given questions, so that he has the answer ready the next time the question is asked.

This article is written by Xavier Biseul and was first published by L'Atelier.

Software programs augmenting recruiters' capabilities