The news is out. Report after report confirms it: businesses agree AI assistants are valuable tools for enhancing productivity at work, and the latest figures show that adoption rates are not slowing down.

Nine in 10 knowledge workers report using GenAI for work, and most are pretty happy about it [McKinsey].

AI vendor spend has nearly tripled this year and stickiness is high at 80% [Ramp].

Global AI adoption by organizations is expected to grow rapidly, with an average yearly increase of 36.6% from 2024 to 2030 [Grand View].

With more low- to no-code tools coming to market, it’s no longer just developers who are building AI solutions. This month, we explore the core elements needed to design AI assistants that employees will love to use.

Top 3 features for AI assistants at work

1. Delightful: A good experience is accurate and fast.

AI assistants need to find the best answers to your questions. They need to search through all your company knowledge across competing and, at times, unstructured data sources to then deliver the right answer quickly. The expectations are high, and for AI assistants to add value, knowledge workers require the best performance: a mixture of speed and accuracy.

The challenge? All models hallucinate today. And while researchers tackle this challenge, in practice, one wrong answer can lower confidence levels and slow down uptake of the tools. That’s why AI assistants need guardrails and extensive testing before going live.

Ultimately, the user experience will be dependent on the frontier model you choose. Cohere Command R+ acts as a core reasoning engine for enterprises, and it is able to accomplish complex tasks and correct itself in the face of a bug or failure, thus increasing its success rate. Plus, our latest models are trained to provide highly accurate, in-line citations, which improves auditability, explainability, and trust in the LLM's outputs.

2. Protected: A safe and secure environment is trustworthy.

Data security and privacy is considered a top risk by companies that want to deploy AI assistants. The models powering them often handle sensitive information and process user-generated content or interactions, which opens these solutions to new vulnerabilities.

To meet regulations, maintain trust, and reduce costs, protecting your data from unauthorized access, disclosure, theft, or manipulation needs to be a top priority across the organization. Cohere’s solutions offer the highest levels of security, privacy, and customization with on-premises and private cloud deployment options. Your data can stay with you at all times to better mitigate against any vulnerabilities. The last thing you want is for your data to wind up in a place where it's unsafe or made public through a malicious attack.

3. Robust: Prioritizing broad connectivity to real-time company data is essential for top-notch performance.

Your AI assistant is only as good as the data it can access. Being able to access real-time data is a prerequisite for any work assistant. Even day-old answers are not good enough. From accessing documents to powering tools like ERP and CRM platforms, you can pick and choose which datastores to connect to and let your AI assistant do the heavy lifting of search and retrieval.

New frontier AI search models like Cohere Compass and Cohere Rerank can supercharge your AI assistant to work across as many tools you want to support. Plus, we’ve outlined the seven essential resources and skills you’ll need to go to the next level with agentic AI.

Ready to start building your first AI assistant? We’ve put together the Cohere Toolkit, an open-source repository of production-ready applications that you can deploy across cloud providers. It contains the components required to build an end-to-end AI assistant, including source code for interfaces, models, and retrieval. And we just added HTML rendering, configurable authentication, and multi-step tool use!

Hype or not, AI is here to stay and growing fast