Today we moved one step closer to realizing the future of work.

Meet the new Digital Workers – now available on the Automation Anywhere Bot Store. Digital Workers are downloadable, plug-and-play digital personas, linking curated software robots with transactional, cognitive and analytical abilities to emulate and connect with human workers. By removing the robotic parts of most people's daily jobs, Digital Workers allow people to refocus their efforts from repetitive and cumbersome activities to value-added work that exercises ingenuity, creativity, empathy and collaboration, making work more human.

Designed to help organizations augment their human workforce, I see these new, human-centric Digital Workers as a key part of accelerating digital transformation. I am excited by this new, cognitive technology that will liberate human workers, enabling them to focus on value-added activities and pursue new skills that exercise their creativity and ingenuity.

While software bots are typically task or process-centric, Digital Workers are human-centric, built to augment human workers in specific business functions across a range of verticals. Some examples of the first available Digital Workers in the Bot Store include a Digital Accounts Payable Clerk, Digital Talent Sourcer and Digital IT Operations Engineer. These cyber employees automate entire processes and perform multiple tasks in a set of sequences, such as regularly submitting invoices through the system from beginning to end. Eventually, these bots can learn to prioritize certain business processes, allowing them to operate in roles such as accounts payable specialists with little to no supervision.

By taking a human-centric approach, rather than just a task or process-focused approach to automation, Automation Anywhere accelerates the realization of ROI from our customers RPA investments.

I believe this is ultimately what the workforce of the future will look like – a seamless blend of human and Digital Workers that enhance each other’s strengths and abilities, ultimately making businesses more efficient.

Digital Workers are designed for the changing landscape of work. It is no secret that enterprises are increasingly augmenting their human workforce with a digital one.

So, what’s driving this shift? The demographics of today’s workforce is changing significantly with millennials, and now Generation Z entering the workforce. By the end of this decade, nearly half of global employees will come from this group of tech-savvy, mobile-centric, socially networked workers. At the same time, companies are facing the inevitability of a rapidly aging workforce and a shortage of skilled labor in many markets. As a result, finding and hiring top talent is becoming a challenge for even the most basic job functions.

This upskilling of the global workforce is also driving business growth – companies that are adapting to a digital world are 26 percent more profitable than their industry peers. That might be even too low an estimate; we know that employee satisfaction is directly linked to employee performance, meaning happier employees are more likely to develop new methods, products and technologies.

Although the business case is clear, revamping an entire organization is a challenge. Pre-built, ready-to-deploy Digital Workers allow businesses to implement AI into business processes 70 percent faster and at less than half the cost incurred by deploying automation from the ground up. With new Digital Workers, we are further defining the future of work, one in which humanity is returned to the workplace and all employees are engines of innovation.

Learn how automation can improve your business, meet the new Digital Workers.