The digital approach could combat the dwindling numbers of humans in the world population, and take jobs in industries ranging from automotive to hospitality, according to a Dutch AI entrepreneur.

Mathijs Gast is the CEO of Freeday, which he describes as a digital staffing agency. Freeday can deploy three digital personas with different specialisms: customer care, finance and accounts payable, and working with payslip and passport checks at banks and insurance companies. “The best thing is, they don’t get sick, they can work 24/7 and they can speak any language,” said Gast in a talk to the Corporate Finance International HR conference in Amsterdam on 3 October. “We deploy these to our clients, basically within the same model as staffing agencies. This is quite successful right now with large clients adopting our digital employees.”

Even staffing agencies are ‘recruiting’ Freeday’s digital employees for hybrid solutions, Gast said: “And then you might think, why would they do that? Aren’t they cannibalising their own businesses because they have the humans and they want that to work? Well, what we’re learning is that no graduates or career-starters want to be the one at the accounts payable department checking invoices and doing all that mundane, robot-like work.”

Gast said that the working agreement between his digital staffing agency and a client involves a monthly contract for the service for a fee. The results, he said, have been favourable. “The thing is, they do two, three or four times as many transactions as the customer service department, that a traditional agency does. A market area in which his digital employees have proved worthwhile is cryptocurrency. A leading cryptocurrency exchange, he said, uses the digital assistants to handle incoming chats. “Whenever Bitcoin hits a high price, they are very busy, but after a few months, we’re still doing the telephone line, so you have a really human-like conversation with AI,” he said.

In summary, he said: “My suggestion is that we broaden the definition of ‘workforce’ to include digital workers and that we all start acting on it.”

By DeeDee Doke

Image credit | iStock