Gartner Predicts 25 Percent of Digital Workers Will Use Virtual Employee Assistants Daily by 2021

The use of virtual assistants (VAs) in the workplace is growing. By 2021, Gartner, Inc. predicts that 25 percent of digital workers will use a virtual employee assistant (VEA) on a daily basis. This will be up from less than 2 percent in 2019. The contact center was the pilot and testing ground for many adopters of VAs, but with the democratization of artificial intelligence (AI) and the development of accurate and clever conversational UIs, different types of VA have arisen: virtual personal assistants (VPAs), virtual customer assistants (VCAs) and VEAs. "We expect VEAs to be used by an increasing number of organizations over the next three years," said Annette Jump, senior director at Gartner.