AI Is Coming for Your Most Mind-Numbing Office Tasks

In 2018, the New York Foundling, a charity that offers child welfare, adoption, and mental health services, was stuck in cut-and-paste hell. Clinicians and admin staff were spending hours transferring text between different documents and databases to meet varied legal requirements. Arik Hill, the charity's chief information officer, blames the data entry drudgery for an annual staff turnover of 42 percent at the time. "We are not a very glamorous industry," says Hill. "We are really only just moving on from paper clinical records." Since then, the New York Foundling has automated much of this grunt work using what are known as software robots--simple programs hand-crafted to perform dull tasks.