WorkDone
An Intelligent System for Institutional Knowledge Retention

Joe Rogers, a highly sought-after global consultant with over 20 years specializing in the enterprise content management and business process management space, assists large multinational companies in reducing operating costs, streamlining business processes, and driving digitization in the workplace. While working on a collaboration involving machine learning technology, Rogers realized that he could utilize AI to automate the capture of skilled worker knowledge and expertise through Work Heuristics Management. This epiphany led to the founding of WorkDone.

By offering a novel, yet simple and user-friendly solution to train digital workers (WorkDone Agents) and complete repetitive back-office tasks, WorkDone creates intelligent systems that preserve corporate memory to ensure that no institutional knowledge is lost when an employee retires or leaves the company.

In an interview with the CIO Applications’ editorial team, Joe Rogers, founder and CEO of WorkDone, sheds light on the company’s innovative solution stack that allows the company to be a pioneer leading the way in the emerging market of Work Heuristics.

What are some of the trends benefitting WorkDone and how exactly does the company leverage them?

Today, companies have difficulty implementing machine learning technologies because of the scarcity of resources. WorkDone serves as an on-ramp for companies to launch AI and machine learning capabilities within their organizations without requiring the addition of hard-to-find technical resources. Earlier, enterprise software came with complicated user manuals and required classroom-training programs to understand their full-scale usability. But then, Apple made popular the concept of easy to use software and improved user experience. Similarly, WorkDone’s technology is designed to be extremely user-friendly to the point where manual intervention becomes invisible and unnecessary. Our patent-pending technology called Expertise Capture runs in the background, observing knowledge workers’ (competent employees) work processes, and determines operational best practices in order to streamline business processes.

Could you elaborate on the Work Heuristics Management?

Work Heuristics Management is the practice of capturing employee-specific, work-related expertise for retention, recombination, and repurposing. Through this, we determine the best way to process specific types of work and retain that knowledge permanently within the clients’ domain, ensuring that the information is never lost when an employee retires or changes jobs.

Once the operational best practices are captured, they can be used to train new workers or automate tasks through WorkDone Agents. Additionally, these WorkDone Agents can be strung together to create a system of intelligence that has the required contextual knowledge to complete an end-to-end transaction across diverse SaaS platforms such as SAP, Sage Intacct, Salesforce, and NetSuite. Basically, without customers having to do anything aside from installing our monitor on their desktop, we can learn and retain the best practices used in their back-office operations to optimize their process automation. You can think of us as “IoT for the back-office” generating work heuristics to populate the “corporate memory”.

Can you walk us through some of the innovative technologies that you leverage at WorkDone?

Our core patent-pending technology is called Expertise Capture, a passive learning mechanism that monitors inbound work, such as invoices, insurance claims, or credit card applications. Then we apply a process called WorkType Analytics to discern the content and nature of the work. Afterwards our machine learning algorithms mine employees’ techniques to generate the best practice for carrying out that particular task and permanently retain it. In effect, Expertise Capture has negligible impact on the actual business operations of clients, and afterwards it becomes much easier to optimize and reengineer the same later on as a follow-on professional services engagement.

What is the key take away for your clients while collaborating with WorkDone?

We created WorkDone as a public benefit corporation where a percentage of our revenue is committed to a non-profit called Work Forward, which is a social network where anyone who cares about the impact of AI on the labor force can join. The Work Forward Foundation is funded by the tech industry to aid workers displaced by automation to transition to their next area of vitality. Any member of the community can submit a proposal for an entrepreneurial venture with the community voting on whether to fund that proposal. This community is managed by smart contracts on the blockchain and includes a support network to help people who are first-time entrepreneurs. As the labor market evolves to a global economy, Work Forward will play an important role in helping people pursue their true passion as opposed to “reskilling” for another “9 to 5”.

How does WorkDone set itself apart in the market?

For context, our Work Heuristics Management platform can be considered next-generation RPA (robotic process automation); we are not just automating keystrokes and mouse clicks but also retaining institutional knowledge to automate multiple tasks enabling human workers to focus on more relevant, satisfying work. The WorkDone platform is a cloud-native SaaS solution, available on subscription that can scale across different SaaS infrastructures. WorkDone differentiates itself in the marketplace by allowing companies to avoid the significant costs and infrastructure impact associated with institutional knowledge loss when valued employees retire or change jobs. With 10,000 workers turning 65 every day and roughly 76m American baby boomers set to retire (part of the 1.6bn people worldwide aged 46-65), WorkDone will play a crucial role in helping the global economy dodge this costly bullet. In addition, our solutions are designed to be adopted quickly by everyone—small to medium enterprises as well as large multinationals—as customers are not required to invest time on training or programming.

Where do you envision your company in the future?

Currently, we are focused on back-office functions while aiming to broaden our global industry offerings from manufacturing to financial services, retail, transportation, telecoms, and more. Our plan is to expand our agent connectivity rapidly from ERP into the CRM, HCM, Social, Marketing Automation, Office Automation, Media Rights, and the Collaboration markets. In the future, we look forward to providing white-labeled vertical solutions beyond back-office work heuristics to specific use cases such as the real estate, hospitality, and even salvage industries.