Prior to joining IPsoft, Chetan served as an assistant professor at New York University. A number of insurers are in the middle of pandemic-proofing their policies, but there is another category flourishing in the sector: technologies tailored to the needs of insurance companies (insurtech). Insurtech focuses on disrupting the industry through technological breakthroughs, and traditional insurance firms are starting to utilize innovative technologies to amplify the work of employees while enhancing the customer experience. The companies that are thriving have embraced the concept of a hybrid workforce -- a culmination of human and digital employees coming together for greater productivity, efficiency and service delivery. Powered by AI, digital employees allow insurers to easily scale their customer-facing processes in any climate.

The COVID-19 pandemic has emptied the world's offices, sending most of us to work from home for the foreseeable future and facilitating a mass migration to the digital workplace. AMELIA ("AI ME AMELIA") from IPsoft can read 300 pages in 30 seconds, comprehend multiple languages (including logic and context), and is installed in more than 500 banks, insurance companies, and retail giants. PCMag Editor-in-Chief Dan Costa interviewed IPsoft CEO Chetan Dube in 2018, so we reached out to see what AMELIA is capable of in 2020, how it's helping with COVID-19 recovery plans, and whether we'll be welcomed back to our workspaces by AMELIA-like AI coworkers. PCMag: According to the World Economic Forum's The Future of Jobs Report, half of the world's employees will be digital by 2025. When you think about the amount of jobs that would be lost in that instance, it is imperative that businesses embrace the technology.

As technologies become increasingly capable of taking on a wide variety of repeatable tasks, many workers may find themselves increasingly nervous about their place in the workforce. Anxieties about technology in the workplace are nothing new -- in fact, they go back centuries. The good news is that the fear of humans being replaced en masse by machines has never been borne out by reality. Rather, history has repeatedly shown that as machines transform whole industries, they also create new opportunities for human workers. Indeed, the US is one of the most developed economies, and therefore one of the most automated, but it also currently has record-low unemployment.

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model forever changed how companies and consumers access computer programs. Rather than install and own one version of a company's product, users were able to download and license software, while relinquishing update and maintenance responsibilities to the software vendor. Another simple yet equally crucial aspect of the SaaS model is the immediacy it allows users to access and run new applications. Why send away for program CDs, or call a vendor to send an install expert, when software can be accessed online, so companies can get to work right away? Businesses are beginning to ask themselves similar questions about accessing AI.

IPsoft, the largest independent leader in enterprise artificial intelligence (AI), announced that Amelia, its industry-leading digital customer service agent, is now available on Genesys AppFoundry from Genesys, the global leader in cloud customer experience and contact centre solutions. Amelia, with her superior conversational AI capabilities, can handle customers' most common requests by herself, without human support, empowering organizations to offer their customers immediate and scalable 24/7 support for faster problem resolutions. The integration of Amelia is available through Genesys Cloud, the industry's leading cloud contact centre platform, with a robust feature set and open APIs, which allows for flexibility, scalability and rapid innovations. Genesys and IPsoft customers, includes Bankia one of the largest banks in Spain. Bankia deployed Amelia as a digital contact centre agent to scale customer service and improve the customer experience.

Convenient, fast and easy access to information has a positive net impact on employee experience and overall production. An employee who spends less time trying to find information feels more connected saves time and can focus on complex projects. Studies show that happier employees stay at a company longer, lowering HR-related costs in the long run- as recruiting and hiring qualified people is an expensive proposition. Satisfied employees also are more productive, create better work and provide a better service experience for their external customers and stakeholders -- which is always beneficial to a company's bottom line.

After her first husband committed suicide while completing his medical residency, Janae Sharp was frustrated at the "code of silence" she observed among physicians regarding physician burnout, believing it was detrimental to solving mental health issues among medical professionals. She wanted to make a difference by finding a way to use data and conversation to lead a cultural shift among physicians and providers. Janae founded her non-profit organization The Sharp Index in March 2018 in order to help increase awareness of and reduce physician suicide through increased use of data science and AI. It was Janae's assertion that by identifying and addressing problems in medical workflows, she could improve and even save lives. The program started with finding a bridge between technology and real-world applications in healthcare.

Speaking at the third annual Digital Workforce Summit in New York City, Gonzalo Gomez Cid, Global Contact Center Director at Telefónica, discussed his company's journey from IVR-based contact centers to AI-driven operations driven by digital labor. Telefónica is a Spanish multinational telecommunications company headquartered in Madrid. It has a presence in 15 countries across Europe and Latin America. In the telco space, it ranks seventh in revenues, sixth in market capitalization and fifth in number of subscribers. Gomez Cid told DWS attendees that Telefónica describes itself as a "company of platforms," including physical assets, networks and IT, and products and services.

"Mia" is the virtual assistant introduced by Australian digital bank Ubank in February 2019. These aren't the members of a new, all-female rock group, but names that several large banks have been giving to their automated digital assistants. So-called chatbots have become a useful cost-cutting tools for companies with large subscriber bases (think banks, insurance firms and mobile phone operators). As they replace human call-center workers, such bots will help save banks an estimated $7.3 billion in operational costs by 2023, Juniper Research predicts. But the proliferation of bots with female names raises questions about whether they might also perpetuate gender stereotypes, particularly around the notion of women in the role of assistants.

NHS Digital wanted to make it easier for users to research and access published NHS health data. To achieve that, the agency partnered with IPsoft to provide users with their own data concierge whom they call ViDA (or Virtual Digital Assistant). ViDA is an always-on conversational agent based on our industry-leading digital colleague, Amelia. Users simply tell ViDA what information they are attempting to locate using everyday language, and ViDA can take it from there. You can read more about the project in detail here from our Cognitive Project Lead for UK Healthcare, David King.