IT issues can be costly for businesses and drive employees to tears – or even to quit. Could a new generation of AI-enhanced support software finally change that?
The program that’s always slow to load, the app that always crashes, the ageing laptop that calls it quits at the most inconvenient times – for millions of knowledge workers, digital disruptions are a fact of life. Taken individually, none are vexing enough to ruin anyone’s day. But across a working week, at the scale of an entire organisation, the time and energy lost to “digital friction” starts to look more serious. In fact, recent research by the digital solutions provider TeamViewer shows that 42% of businesses have experienced direct revenue loss because of it.
Groundhog data
Until now, IT support has relied on reactive firefighting – often having to resolve the same issues over and over again – says Sebastian Schrötel, senior vice-president for AI, automation and technology at TeamViewer. “It’s very traditional. I have a problem with my computer; I open a ticket. Someone takes the ticket at some point, connects back to me, then solves the problem.” At every stage, productive work time is wasted waiting for a fix.
The most obvious cost is the losses in productivity and sales – 48% of businesses report seeing delays to critical operations or projects. But when digital friction accumulates, you start to lose high-value employees too. The compounding effect of being unable to work efficiently because of frustrating, repetitive issues can lead to a CV being updated and a call to a recruiter. TeamViewer found that 36% of employees have considered leaving their company due to digital friction.
“Digital friction is everything that occurs where my digital workplace does not act and react as I would expect it to,” says Schrötel. “I get a certain negative sentiment as a human user – my device is not working, my device is slow, I’m getting frustrated. I may even start shouting!” In fact, adds Schrötel, TeamViewer’s research shows that about 6% of people have even cried at work because of digital friction.
You might think the solution lies in shifting from reactive to proactive support, but actually, says Schrötel, it goes a step further. The real competitive edge, he says, comes in shifting from proactive to predictive support, with digital employee experience at the centre of everything.
You can’t fix what you can’t find
After a decade-long career in workplace AI (yes, it really has been around that long), Schrötel is at the helm of TeamViewer ONE, an AI-enhanced, unified IT platform that’s taken the company from its roots as one of the originators of remote work tech to all-round digital workplace platform.
Those roots are still very much visible: TeamViewer ONE’s comprehensive suite of endpoint management, monitoring and automation tools was designed from the ground up for real-time remote working. That’s one of the ways it can pre-empt bottlenecks: instantaneous, deep telemetry data from every device across the company is automatically collated to show patterns as they emerge.
It’s this synthesised overview, says Schrötel, that allows IT staff (and their AI agents) to start working on a fix before a single support ticket has been written. In fact, since a surprising number of employees – known as “silent sufferers”, he says – don’t inform IT about the issues they encounter, the gap between emergence and resolution can be even longer when you rely on old-school reporting methods.
That’s not to say human reporting has no place. A key part of TeamViewer ONE is digital employee experience (DEX) monitoring. This combines quantitative telemetry data with more qualitative sources, such as user surveys, feedback and support tickets. The resultant unified scoring allows companies an unrivalled glimpse of employee satisfaction and happiness, as well as a live view of how much it improves when little bits of friction disappear.
See the future, be the future
Given enough time and data, TeamViewer ONE can identify where problems commonly occur across the organisation, and create anticipatory fixes. But – says Schrötel, reacting to a common concern about AI-powered workplaces – nothing gets deployed without your say-so, unless of course you choose to configure it that way. AI is a powerful tool, but human ingenuity is still very much part of the process at TeamViewer.
“Work is shifting – elevating to higher-value tasks,” he says. “We still need the IT professionals, but the IT professionals will no longer solve the same ticket 30 times a day. They work together with an AI agent to crunch data, to find root causes and best solutions. With the creation of automations, fixes and reactive support, it’s human-AI interaction. The human is still there, but the output will be more with the same amount of time and people.”
So how have knowledge workers reacted to their newfound AI co-workers, in his experience? “Some years back, when I was working on user interviews, I was thinking about what the reaction of service centre workers might be – would they be hesitant because it might take their jobs?
“Do you know what the answer was, from the service centre workers I met that day? ‘Thank God I don’t have to do that any more.’”
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