April 15, 2025
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Danish brewer provides AI 'colleagues' to human group
They’ve names, faces, and e mail addresses, however the 5 new colleagues at Denmark's Royal Unibrew solely exist within the digital realm, which the brewer hails as a milestone to unleash the total potential of its employees.
"What we as people are good at is our creativity, our empathy, our data of our prospects," advertising and marketing director Michala Svane informed AFP.
Svane defined that working along with their digital colleagues, their human workers "get assist for extra routine-based work and discovering info."
With the assistance of Danish firm Manifold AI, she has enriched her group with 5 AI "colleagues": model specialist KondiKai, market analyst Athena, Prometheus, who gathers all gross sales knowledge, Moller, a sommelier specializing in pairing meals and beer, and commerce specialist Ella.
Initially, the assistants operated with out names, however the 5 "colleagues" now all have a backstory, can swap outfits, and work together every day with different workers.
The corporate has made images of the "colleagues"—three males and two girls, all enticing and match—and human workers work together with them through chats and emails.
"Once we put an image on the AI agent, the use and the engagement went up occasions 4," Svane stated.
Based on Svane, she hasn't sensed any apprehension from the human employees in accepting their digital co-workers.
Jan Damsgaard, a professor specializing in digital transformations at Copenhagen Enterprise College, defined that AI workers are sometimes designed as "personas" for a greater consumer expertise for these interacting with them.
"They’re created to take care of particular points," Damsgaard informed AFP.
At Royal Unibrew, Denmark's second-largest brewer, Karin Jorgensen, who heads the group liable for knowledge assortment and evaluation and converses every day with Athena, her "sparring accomplice."
In the meanwhile, she is within the non-alcoholic beer market, and conversing through the moment messaging service Groups Athena guides her by way of already accomplished studies and an summary of the market.
"Earlier than, there have been lots of emails coming in. And we needed to search for previous studies and do lots of connecting issues and so forth. We now have positively moved to extra agility, extra pace," Jorgensen informed AFP.
One other benefit, she stated, is that evaluation and collating info may be stored in-house.
"We’re getting rather more worth and getting rather more efficient as we work," the analyst stated.
Jorgensen can also be anticipating additional developments, similar to Athena having the ability to take part in conferences.
Important pondering
Whereas this new relationship could make workers extra productive, they should be conscious that they preserve their vital pondering abilities, one of many managers Lise Knuppert Hordam warned.
"It’s good to be vital of all the pieces that comes from KondiKai as a result of he’s a machine," she stated.
"What he says is predicated on all the information we gave him. So it’s legitimate what he says, nevertheless it wants a human contact and artistic pondering," she stated.
The event of those new instruments, or "colleagues," shouldn’t be solely a technological feat for Michala Svane, however it’s also laying the muse for a hybrid group of people and AI co-workers that work collectively effortlessly.
However each new know-how additionally carries threat, in keeping with Damsgaard.
On this case, what raises questions are the interactions between workers and their AI colleagues: what occurs when your closest colleague is an AI collaborator and never an actual particular person? What do you do if a human colleague conflicts with an AI co-worker?
"It's one thing we all know little about," the researcher stated, including that he hoped such questions will get answered because the know-how developed.
© 2025 AFP
Quotation: Danish brewer provides AI 'colleagues' to human group (2025, April 15) retrieved 15 April 2025 from https://techxplore.com/information/2025-04-danish-brewer-ai-colleagues-human.html This doc is topic to copyright. Other than any truthful dealing for the aim of personal research or analysis, no half could also be reproduced with out the written permission. The content material is offered for info functions solely.
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