“So what can a digital coworker actually do?”
That is the question that follows immediately once you understand what a digital coworker is. And it is a fair one — the term says nothing in itself about which work gets done.
What follows is a description of where our digital coworkers do most of their work today. Five areas. It is deliberately not a recommendation about where you should start — that depends on how your own business runs, not on what is most common elsewhere.
Purchasing
Purchasing work is often split into many small decisions that each take a few minutes. Someone checks stock levels, concludes it is time to order, finds the right supplier and agreement, and sends a purchase order. Then the delivery has to be watched until it arrives, matched against the order and registered.
None of the parts is hard. The problem is that they never end, and that they compete with work requiring more thought.
A digital coworker in purchasing watches reorder points continuously, produces purchasing proposals from your supplier agreements, and follows deliveries through to goods receipt. If quantity or price differs from the order, the case stops.
What changes: the purchase order goes out the same day the need arises, rather than the next time someone had a moment to look.
Sales
This is where the work shows most clearly on the outside, because a customer is waiting for an answer.
An order arrives as an email or a PDF. The lines have to be interpreted, matched to the right item and customer price, registered in the ERP and confirmed. A request for quote has to be answered with the right items, the right contract discount and the right lead time — and then followed up if it goes quiet.
It is work that is repetitive without being simple. Every order looks slightly different, and it is precisely that variation which is why it was never automated before.
A digital coworker in sales receives incoming orders and enquiries, checks them against agreements and order history, creates the record in the ERP and sends the confirmation. If something looks unusual — a price that does not match, a discontinued item, a quantity outside the customer’s pattern — the case goes to a person.
What changes: the confirmation goes out the same day, including when volume is high or somebody is away.
Sales support
This is the area that tends to surprise people, because the work rarely shows up in any system.
A rep is at a customer and needs a stock balance, a price, or the customer’s previous order history. The question goes to inside sales, who drops what they were doing, digs out the answer and sends it back. Meanwhile the rep waits, and the customer meeting moves on without the answer.
The cost is double: an interrupted colleague, and an answer that arrived too late to use.
A digital coworker in sales support answers that kind of question directly — by email or chat — by looking the details up in the ERP.
What changes: the answer arrives during the customer meeting rather than after it, and inside sales is not interrupted.
Customer support
In most businesses the most common customer question is some version of “where is my order?”.
It is easy to answer and impossible to avoid. Someone looks the status up in the system and replies. For the tenth time that day. It is work that requires no expertise but still requires a person, and so it is permanently in the way of the conversations that genuinely need one.
A digital coworker in customer support looks up order status, lead times and back orders and replies without anyone having to go searching. Questions that call for judgement — claims, discrepancies, dissatisfaction — are handed on.
What changes: routine questions are answered within minutes around the clock, and the team gets room back for the difficult conversations.
Finance
Finance administration is the area where the consequence of an error is most concrete, and where the checking work therefore takes the most time.
Supplier invoices arrive as PDFs in an inbox. Amounts have to be read, matched to the right purchase order and goods receipt, coded according to your rules and sent on for approval. It is careful work, and it has to be done every time even though ninety per cent of invoices are entirely undramatic.
A digital coworker in finance reads the invoice, matches it against the purchase order and goods receipt, and codes it to your rules. If everything matches it goes on for approval. If amounts or quantities differ it stops and is flagged.
What changes: only the exceptions reach a human. The rest passes without anyone needing to look.
What the five have in common
There is a thread running through all five, and it is not about technology.
In every case the work is something that has to be done, that nobody chose to do, and that is the first thing to be left undone when things get busiest. The queue of unconfirmed orders does not grow when it is quiet — it grows in peak season and over the holidays, exactly when it costs the most.
That is also why these areas tend to meet little internal resistance. Nobody defends the job of typing order lines in by hand.
What stays with the human
Just as important: none of the five digital coworkers makes the decisions that matter.
Pricing, customer relationships, negotiation, claims, technical judgement and anything that departs from the normal all remain with your people. What moves is the data entry, the lookups and the monitoring — the work that fills a day without anyone getting better at their job because of it.
Exactly where that line sits is yours to decide, per role.
If you are wondering where you would start
That cannot be answered from a list like this one. It depends on where your own time actually goes, and you can see that better than we can from the outside.
How to look for it I have written about in The operational perspective, and how to take it further into something that actually runs Per Videgren has written about in How to get started with AI in your business.
If you would rather think out loud about a specific process, it is quicker to just get in touch.