Despite rising employee worries about artificial intelligence (AI) applications potentially taking over their jobs, business owners may actually find workers currently performing data entry tasks welcoming some help from a bot. If so, their managers should consider seizing that opportunity. Because in addition to saving companies thousands of dollars that manual inputting costs each year, employers who decide to automate the chore can address other workforce concerns as well -- including burnout-fueled staff turnover.
Those are a few of the findings in a recent survey of 500 U.S. professionals whose jobs either partially or entirely involve entering data from printed matter, pdfs, spreadsheets, or reports into digital systems. The poll was carried out by automated file extraction tech company Parseur, which has obvious business interests in encouraging companies to computerize the task of transcribing information from one medium into another. Still, the study's results offer some compelling arguments for making that switch using AI apps. Leading those is the average per-worker $28,500 cost of manual inputting each year -- an expense a specialized bot could almost entirely eliminate.
That heavy annual expense is even bigger for companies in tech, finance, and law sectors, where wages tend to be higher -- often from $50 to $100 an hour for workers who manually type data into computer systems. But with nearly 31 percent of all respondents reporting they spend from 11 to over 20 hours each week on those tasks -- and another 30 estimating that weekly workload at between six to 10 hours -- the cost of inputting by hand is significant for businesses in all sectors.
Yet salaries are only one source of those expenses. For starters, 56 percent of survey respondents reported experiencing burnout from the repetitive grind of manual data entry. That, the report said, was a major contributor to staffing turnover.
Not surprisingly 50.4 percent of survey respondents also admitted that errors they made at some point having had expensive consequences. In other words, their weariness with the work occasionally led to commit inputting mistakes, which at the very least cost their businesses time and money to chase down and correct. But not only.
Indeed, companies can also lose out on opportunities during those administrative delays. In addition, they can be hit with fines or other penalties imposed by authorities if flawed business documents are determined to be non-compliant. Specialized AI apps, by contrast, have extremely low error rates, even as they dramatically speed data entry by automating the process.
And far from employees fretting about the tech taking over their manual inputting of invoices, timesheets, customer intake, and sales, purchase, and work orders, Parseur said many respondents said they'd welcome the chance to spend the time saved through automation on more valuable and compelling work. Topping the other tasks they cited as priorities were strategic planning, customer experience enhancement, and revenue-focused activities.
"These are hours that companies are burning on tasks that can and should be automated," said Parseur co-founder and CEO Sylvestre Dupont in comments accompanying the survey's results. "It's not just a financial issue; it's also about opportunity cost. The survey reveals that American workers would rather spend their time improving operations, serving customers, or working on growth initiatives."
Still, a lot of workplaces are hesitating to embrace AI in that way.
The survey found 42.6 percent of participants said they had never used AI tech to automate data entry, with nearly a quarter saying they simply didn't know what tools were available for that. Another 27.2 percent were aware of those, but didn't feel they had the authority to switch from manual imputing methods to automating them with apps without orders from company managers.
Parseur argues those employees would be wise to proactively request and obtain that authorization from their bosses sooner rather than later, and avoid having to rush to embrace AI bots once sticking with manual data entry becomes obsolete.
"By 2030, automation of manual data entry is expected to be industry-standard," Parseur's report claims. "Early adopters gain competitive and strategic advantages."
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