Pioneering AI In Work Management

August 21, 2023 - 7 min read

Alexey Korotich

The power of artificial intelligence (AI) has reshaped the way we work, collaborate, and innovate. Embracing this transformative force, Wrike has consistently demonstrated its commitment to AI-driven solutions. With our recently expanded Work Intelligence® solution, we are taking leadership in AI to new heights.

Here, I’ll delve into Work Intelligence® and how we are spearheading the future of AI in work management.

Try Wrike AI

A trailblazer in AI

Wrike has long been recognized as a leader in AI-powered work management and collaboration. Our unwavering dedication to harnessing the full potential of AI has consistently driven innovation, productivity, and efficiency in organizations worldwide.

Here are a few things we have been and will continue to be focused on delivering in our platform:

Intelligent automation: Wrike’s AI algorithms empower organizations to automate manual tasks, freeing up time and other resources for high-value activities. By automating mundane processes, teams can focus on strategic initiatives, problem solving, and creativity. The result is enhanced productivity, improved employee engagement, and exponential growth.
Advanced data insights: Leveraging the power of AI, the Work Intelligence® solution will enable customers to gain unprecedented insights from vast amounts of data. By analyzing patterns, trends, and correlations, organizations can make informed, data-driven decisions, identify opportunities, and address potential challenges. Wrike’s AI-driven insights can serve as a compass, guiding customers toward optimal outcomes.
Intelligent resource allocation: Work Intelligence® will optimize resource allocation through intelligent analysis of historical data, project requirements, and team capabilities. This ensures that resources are efficiently distributed, maximizing productivity, and minimizing bottlenecks. With AI-powered resource allocation, organizations can achieve greater efficiency, agility, and scalability.
Seamless collaboration: Collaboration lies at the heart of successful organizations. Wrike’s Work Intelligence® solution fosters a collaborative ecosystem by seamlessly integrating AI-powered tools and features. Teams can effortlessly communicate, share knowledge, and work together in a cohesive manner, irrespective of geographical boundaries. This cohesive collaboration encourages creativity and synergy.
Future-ready customization: Recognizing that every organization is unique, Wrike can offer customizable AI workflows. This flexibility allows businesses to tailor AI capabilities to align with their specific needs and processes. As organizations evolve and adapt, they can embrace AI in a way that complements their vision, culture, and strategic objectives.

How Wrike’s Work Intelligence® solution can help your team

What does that mean for the work you do on a daily basis? Our AI features help you:

Prioritize your most important work

Make sure you and your team target your most valuable work with Wrike’s automated task prioritization recommendations. AI will review and reorder your workflow according to urgency, so you can kick-start every day with a ready-made to-do list.

Keep projects smooth and streamlined

Wrike’s machine learning capabilities can identify historical patterns and frequent issues to provide a 360° view of project risk factors. Advance insights from AI help to prevent delays, optimize resources, and deliver projects on time, every time.

Create your own digital assistant

All you need is a smartphone to start delegating actions with mobile voice commands — no need to open Wrike first. Cut out admin time and speed up delivery by telling Wrike what to do, including creating, checking, and accessing tasks and projects.

Turn written documents into digital files

Save time inputting details from paper notes into descriptions, comments, or request forms. Take photo copies of printed documents or notes, upload them to the Wrike mobile app, and let Wrike OCR digitize this into text data.

Transform text into tasks

AI can transform rough notes into a task in seconds. It will analyze your project plan or meeting notes, create a parent task, decipher actionable steps, and, with the click of a button, automatically create subtasks that will take you from scribbled ideas to successful delivery.

NEW! Generate briefs in seconds

Now available in Wrike Labs, our generative AI feature allows you to create project briefs in the blink of an eye. Draft descriptions from scratch and tweak them to suit your brand voice. You can also use this feature to summarize text and translate it into different languages. Give it a try!

The future state of Work Intelligence®

While Work Intelligence® already includes an array of groundbreaking capabilities that redefine the landscape of AI in work management, we’re not stopping there. Let’s take a look at our next product roadmap for AI innovations aimed at delivering the future state of intelligent work management.

Planned updates include:

Intelligent search: Using natural language support, Wrike will quickly search and find items, assets, tools, help articles, templates, and more in a way that users are familiar with, similar to their favorite search engines.
Work assistant: Introducing a personalized educational wizard to the platform will allow users to get instant access to relevant information and solutions for the problem at hand.
Smart suggestions: By detecting patterns in user actions, Wrike will proactively make helpful suggestions, such as automating repeatable items, starting an approval, and adding actionable subitems.

Embracing a visionary future

Our efforts in AI don’t just begin and end with our platform. We’re also focused on shaping the future in modern work, but it takes adoption.

Here are some ways you can embrace the potential of AI:

Foster a culture of innovation

By leveraging AI technology, your employees will have more time for innovative thinking. Embrace AI as an enabler that amplifies human creativity and problem solving, empowering teams to explore uncharted territories.

Embrace ethical AI

As AI continues to advance, you must prioritize ethical considerations. By adopting responsible AI practices, organizations can build trust, ensure transparency, and mitigate biases, thereby creating a positive and inclusive future.

Continuously learn and adapt

AI technology is ever-evolving, and you must stay abreast of the latest developments. By investing in continuous learning and upskilling, you can navigate the dynamic landscape of AI with confidence. Seek out opportunities to expand knowledge, attend industry conferences, and engage in thought leadership to stay ahead of the curve.

Emphasize human-AI collaboration

The future of AI lies in harnessing the synergy between human intelligence and AI capabilities. Encourage collaboration between humans and AI systems, leveraging the unique strengths of each. This collaborative approach will ease the transition to a more AI-focused workplace, creating a powerful partnership that incorporates the best of both worlds.

Embrace change as an opportunity

The integration of AI technology brings about transformative change. Welcome change as an opportunity for growth, encouraging your teams to embrace new ways of working and adapting to AI-driven solutions. By fostering a growth mindset and providing the necessary support, you can empower teams to thrive in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Our expanded Work Intelligence® solution exemplifies our visionary approach to AI. By championing the power of AI, organizations can unlock new levels of productivity, boosting collaboration and reducing decision making time.

As we embrace the future, it is you who will guide your organization toward success by leveraging AI as a catalyst for technological innovation as well as human potential. With Wrike’s Work Intelligence® at the helm, organizations are well equipped to navigate the exciting journey of AI in work management, shaping a future where human ingenuity and AI capabilities work hand in hand.

Try Wrike AI

Alexey Korotich

Alexey Korotich is Wrike’s Vice President of Product. Alexey has more than 15 years of experience in enterprise software design, security, product development, and management. His ability to define the long-term vision and management requirements for new, category-defining enterprise solutions has led to numerous successful go-to-market plans and launches.

#Automation #Thought Leadership #Wrike Features

Project Management 10 min read

Working With Machines: AI in Work Management

The age of artificial intelligence (AI) is upon us, changing forever the way companies operate and grow. Machine learning (ML) now helps to predict and minimize delays, reduce time spent on mundane tasks, and optimize the skills and talents of the human workforce. [caption id="attachment_475270" align="aligncenter" width="868"]Generated by Midjourney[/caption] PwC refers to AI as a ‘game changer’ in digital transformation, contributing as much as $15.7trn to the global economy by 2030. Wrike is at the forefront of this wave, developing the best AI tools, solutions, and features on the market, saving 20,000 organizations time and money every year. But what does AI in a work management platform look like? And where might it take us in the future? The adoption of AI is underway They don’t look like the futuristic robots we once imagined but, in reality, machines are already part of our daily life. At home, we use AI every time we ask Siri or Alexa a question, open our phones using facial recognition, or scroll through a streaming service’s TV suggestions. [caption id="attachment_475276" align="aligncenter" width="811"]Generated by Midjourney[/caption] AI also has a major influence on our work. We might rely on AI to help us manage customer relationships through chatbots, scan for fraudulent activity in financial systems, or turn documents into data via optical character recognition (OCR). Gartner estimates that a third of organizations are currently applying AI across several business units, a figure that is only set to grow. There are many reasons why companies choose to use the best AI tools available. For example, they may wish to: Save time spent on tedious tasks Optimize processes through automation efficiencies Accelerate and ameliorate customer service Gather and analyze data for better decision-making Seek out opportunities for new revenue streams The benefits of AI are clear to most stakeholders, particularly during a challenging economic climate. Research from Forrester indicates that 80% of executives say AI boosts productivity and creates new positions. At the same time, about 20% of all workers say they will use automated assistance technologies to make decisions and get work done. [caption id="attachment_475282" align="aligncenter" width="730"]Source: Forrester[/caption] “We see similar statistics in Wrike as well,” says Igor Akimov, Head of AI Solutions at Wrike. “More than a quarter of our users work with AI Recommended Tasks every day.” He has ample experience leveraging ML systems, and believes that AI can help us reach significant breakthroughs without the need for major investment. One of the reasons why Wrike represents such good value to its 2.3m customers is because it delivers the best artificial intelligence tools for project and task management, for a fraction of the cost of bespoke software engineering solutions. The many roles of AI in the workplace The ways in which AI can help us in our work expands every year. Some of the most interesting uses to emerge include: AI as an artist Text and picture generation is more advanced than ever before, with the best AI tools including DALL-E 2, Midjourney.com, Stable Diffusion, and so on. These neural networks are fed with billions of images with descriptions, allowing you to generate content with just a single text prompt. This means that AI can not only copy famous images and create psychedelic graphics, but also generate award-winning masterpieces like this one by Jason Allen and Midjourney AI. AI as a developer Platforms such as Copilot from GitHub can now accept requests and write code based on your comments, saving developers or software engineers countless hours in the process. For example, if you need to write simple but time-consuming code to program a form to access a database, you can simply enter the instruction, select the data from a table, put it into an array, and let AI write the code for you. This has the benefit of extending basic coding abilities to people outside of the developer audience. AI as a writer Drafting high-quality content for books, education materials, or blogs takes time. While AI won’t be as natural or nuanced as a professional writer any time soon, it can significantly accelerate the researching, writing, and editing process. With GPT-3 from OpenAI, you can generate whole articles from one sentence. For example, AI suggested that this piece of text should follow the previous sentences: Artificial intelligence is also being used to create music. For example, Google's AI Magenta project is creating algorithms that can generate original music. For example, teams can overnight data, feed it to personal learning models, and use AI to craft statements that leverage key elements. Some creative teams are using this technology now to generate raw content that can be later finessed by human editors. Startups such as Jasper.AI help thousands of companies to create marketing materials. On a day-to-day basis, almost all writers use some level of AI-driven technology to find relevant search terms, auto-complete predicted text, and check spelling or grammar. AI as an administrator The best AI tools in project management have the ability to take care of time-consuming tasks and monotonous work with automations, suggestions, and search intent technology. Robotic process automation (RPA) or standard automation can replace tedious work like opening an item in one app and then copying or moving it somewhere else. However, these days AI can also infiltrate our creative and management work, something that was not achievable even two years ago. Automating workflows makes progress from project planning to delivery far more efficient. It can adjust tasks, assign owners, ask for approvals, and offer updates in the background while humans take care of the more valuable work. AI and work 3.0 [caption id="attachment_475312" align="aligncenter" width="811"]Generated by Midjourney[/caption] The way we work has been transformed in recent years. While we may be working remotely, or outside of the 9-5, we’re also dealing with high levels of complexity, with some knowledge workers using up to 14 different applications every day. Choosing the right work management platform is vital to effectively manage more data, more connectivity, and more expectations than ever before. If organizations want to drive results and reduce busywork in this new modern environment, the best work management software option for them will be one that includes artificial intelligence tools. Take Wrike’s ability to analyze computing behavior to predict a user’s next actions, for example. This means that if a Wrike user tends to start their day by viewing their dashboard or opening request forms, AI can learn and then replicate these steps every morning. The best AI tools can also take care of the most time-consuming data entry tasks, like transcribing meeting notes. Automation such as Wrike’s AI engine can then use those notes to find actionable tasks and create action lists and project plans. Users can further extend this process by highlighting key parts of the text to create subtasks, instantly transforming a meeting discussion into tangible actions — something we can do today with AI Subitem Creation. Wrike’s advanced AI Search can even recommend who might be the right person to carry out these subtasks, saving yet more time in the planning journey. AI has been able to analyze large volumes of complex data for some time but, in the near future, it’ll also be able to summarize the contents for humans. For example, a manager who wants to check on a project could click to receive a short video reel, a one-page brief, or an AI-voiced verbal update. As with most things, artificial intelligence tools are only as good as the data that powers them. Some work management software providers have limited access to good-quality data in the system, but Wrike is different. We’ve invested heavily in the area of AI in project management, which led to our exciting Work Intelligence technology. This creates a structure that understands the issues, dependencies, and human input challenges of your working environment, and puts that knowledge to work to suggest accurate answers to your queries. This type of differentiating factor will become all the more important in the future, as work continues to become more complex and the data we deal with more dense. Humans and machines: The dream team [caption id="attachment_475318" align="aligncenter" width="811"]Generated by Midjourney[/caption] Much has been written about ‘robots replacing humans’ and the possibility of machines taking over our roles in the workplace. Like the Industrial Revolution in the past, the global embrace of AI may well result in a shift in job roles, but that doesn’t have to mean job losses. In fact, Forrester research predicts that cognitive technologies such as robots, AI, ML, and automation will create 9% of new U.S. jobs by 2025. These new jobs may include robot monitoring professionals, data scientists, automation specialists, and content curators. A recent Stanford study titled ‘How to Survive the A.I. Revolution’ recommends a human-centred approach to AI, which envisions “a future where people and machines are collaborators, not competitors.” We shouldn’t expect machines to be just like humans, they say. They can do some tasks very well, while we have more time to excel at other types of work. For example, creatives could channel the technology to take care of the research stage, so they can focus on crafting engaging visual or written messaging. It’s also important to recognise that there will always be cases where a human’s input is needed. Take chatbots, for example. Sure, they can answer quick queries or funnel users into specific categories. But for more complicated questions, most people will opt for the ‘speak to an operator’ option. On the upside, that operator will have more time to spend on resolving your problem, because the chatbot is taking care of the rest of the queue. The best outcomes are achieved by combining human expertise and experience with the speed and efficiency of ML. One can benefit the other, ultimately providing customers, clients, and companies with a better experience and service. AI and Wrike — An exciting future AI is advancing at such a rapid pace, every year brings huge leaps forward. Connected devices are one of the most exciting frontiers, representing a way for humans to feel at home, wherever they are. As machines continue to learn, they will better understand humans’ habits, particularly as our interactions extend from our laptops to our phones, cars, and even the kitchen fridge. Over time, these computers will know a lot about us, which will allow them to recognize our pain points and deliver bespoke solutions. Wrike already does this for us at work. Every time the platform digitizes data and connects to different integrations like Slack, email, or Zoom, it better understands our everyday needs. It can then offer a variety of ways to make the process smoother and faster, such as suggested to-do lists via AI Recommended Tasks, daily due date reminders, and nudges for overdue approvals. That means greater clarity around your workflow and much improved focus on the priorities at hand. A good example of this is Wrike’s risk predictor, which leverages an advanced work graph model, the user’s interactions with the platform, and thousands of other data points to help flag at-risk projects. “Our AI Project Risk Prediction can help managers and owners track their projects without active involvement,” Akimov explains. “The system monitors your projects for any risks that may cause you to miss your deadlines, then assigns a risk level (low, medium, or high). It was developed using our custom-built AI and learning from millions of Wrike projects.” This all helps to focus teams on the work that matters most, ensure consistently on-time delivery, and position the organization for growth in a rapidly changing environment. A transformative technology Forbes writes: “There has been no better time to be in the world of artificial intelligence than now. AI has achieved an inflection point and is poised to transform every industry.” This means that the time is now for organizations to build the technology into their daily operations. Those who don’t might find themselves left behind, as competitors harness the best AI tools to pull ahead. The good news is that Wrike makes taking the first step easy. When you become a Wrike customer, you open up a world of possibilities, which includes 360° operational visibility, cutting-edge collaboration features, valuable data analysis and powerful automation. Wrike can help you create a more productive, efficient, and profitable work environment by enhancing your human resources with AI. Ready to see how? Get a free two-week trial today to see how Wrike can put machines to work for you.

News 5 min read

Building Actionable Futures With Wrike’s AI Subtask Creation for Meetings

Wrike's AI Subtask Creation automatically sifts through unstructured meeting notes and turns key action items into subtasks. Read on to learn more.

Project Management 7 min read

How Wrike Uses AI to Transform the Future of PMO

Wrike is pioneering artificial intelligence in project management offices, harnessing the power of machine learning to connect strategy with execution.

For Teams

Use cases

Apps & Integrations

Explore Wrike

Learn and connect

Become Wrike Pro

Pioneering AI In Work Management

A trailblazer in AI