There will be a shift from task training to knowledge workers. With manual tasks being taken care of by artificial intelligence (AI), users of critical business applications will be expected to understand much more of the business processes and philosophies, and be able to apply critical thinking to their everyday job functions. Employees who once were focused on the execution of basic tasks will become knowledge workers.
- Microlearning at the point-of-work gets big. The proliferation of technology solutions has overwhelmed companies—or more specifically, their employees. These solutions aren’t usually intuitive, and they do a bad job of providing guidance at the point-of-work. They also aren’t equipped to walk users through the best use cases for their specific industry or company processes. Micro-learning will emerge as an effective way to provide short bursts of knowledge transfer—whether about proprietary company knowledge and compliance guidelines or how to execute a task using the software at hand—at the user’s moment-of-need and point-of-work.
- Technology will understand user intent and step in to optimize people and processes. Almost all software companies know every click users make in their applications, in real time. They are armed with an array of tools to facilitate this collection and glean insights from it. What has been missing is a true understanding of what the user was trying to accomplish and whether he or she succeeded or failed. 2019 will be the year technology will begin understanding the difference between user intent and basic software functionality.
- Armed with this information, companies can target individual, team, and function improvement efforts. And software companies can intervene proactively with customers who are on the path to sub-optimal outcomes. Additionally, this will inform software companies and their customers of the potential need for application or business process optimization.
Mike Graham is CEO of Epilogue Systems.
