Dive Brief:

• Unisys believes enterprises have a significant opportunity to integrate personal virtual assistants into their enterprise systems to do things like answer work-related queries and make employees more efficient, according to a ZDNet report. 

• Paul Gleeson, VP and global head of Service Management and SIAM at Unisys, refers to the movement as "Bring Your Own Automation" (BYOA).

• Unisys recently conducted a successful test by plugging Amazon Echo into an enterprise system to see if the two systems could work together, according to the report. The example the company used was having an employee ask to have their passwords reset to default when working remotely. 

Dive Insight:

Security protocols aside, small test cases will create a foundation for further BYOA integration. Vendors are working to create ways for the automation of everyday tasks in order to free employees from time-consuming, rote tasks. But companies cannot scale to full virtual assistant integration without case studies and examples of the technology in action. 

As consumer-based virtual assistants evolve, integrating similar technology into an office setting could likely come next. ThoughtWorks recently predicted Alexa, Siri and Cortana and other smart devices could soon be heading into the enterprise to handle a multitude of simple tasks and allow workers to focus on bigger picture needs.

Unisys isn’t the only business exploring how personal virtual assistants could impact business strategy. Earlier this year, Amazon Web Services announced Amazon Connect, a self-service, cloud-based contact center service for the enterprise. The service uses Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa to respond to questions over the phone or via text, its Lex chatbot building service and its text-to-speech program Polly.