emergingpayrolltechDon’t worry, payroll professionals. Robots are not going to take your job.

Wednesday’s workshop session, “What Every Payroll Professional Needs to Know About Emerging Payroll Technologies,” explained why the payroll industry would not turn into the next sci-fi movie where sentient machines would replace human workers.

The session was hosted by Fidelma McGuirk, Founder and CEO of Payslip, and Joe Ziska, Section Manager Compensation and Organizational Management at BMW Manufacturing Co., LLC.

McGuirk started the presentation by explaining that we should not fear advances in technology in the payroll industry.

“Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a solution,” said McGuirk, who was named this year’s Global Vision Award winner at Congress Xstream. “Robots are no longer physical machines—it’s software.”

The usefulness of robotics in payroll will come in its ability to eliminate repetitive work for human employees. This includes the most repetitive tasks like data management, onboarding and offboarding, handling deductions, and payroll validation and reconciliation.

“Robots and humans will work together,” she said. “There are many factors to consider when you’re considering RPA in your payroll organization.”

Barbara Youngman, CPP, Senior Payroll Analyst for Toyota Motor North America, attended the presentation Wednesday afternoon. She said she has seen how RPA has positively impacted her company firsthand.

“Our mindset is automation first,” she said. “We use several bots in payroll and are slowly building more. For example, we use it for analyzing reports from our time system, which reduces processing time and allows our time processors to better use their time. Our organization has saved more than 100,000 hours over the last year.”

Ziska continued the presentation by talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it is different from RPA. RPA is elegant, he said, but cannot learn. AI is technology that has the capacity to learn over time.

“AI has the ability to grow,” he said. “In payroll, this is an area that is still very new. I think there is a lot of value there, including in the areas of reporting requests, self-service support, technical trouble shooting, front-line customer service, and predictive analytics.”

Ziska said a chat bot was recently implemented at BMW. His colleague Ted Cwynar, who works at BMW’s HR Service Center, explained why they decided to add a bot to their customer service department.

“It became apparent that a chat bot could address increased needs and answer FAQs,” Cwynar said. “It gives support to customers 24/7. We were able to scale it very quickly. Today, the chat bot has become an integral component of the service team.”

Feedback on “Emerging Payroll Technologies” was positive and many attendees interacted with one another throughout the session.

“Great information and presentation,” said Debe Armstrong, CPP, Senior Director of Payroll at U.S. Anesthesia Partners.