Fujitsu unveiled its first public demonstration of Fujitsu Digital Workforce, a cloud-based platform that automates repetitive, low-value tasks in order to free up staff to engage in more complex and higher priority assignments and projects. Fujitsu Digital Workforce offers organizations a number of benefits, including improved speed and consistency of tasks that are prone to human error, significant cost benefits to employee workhours being used more productively, and easy implementation without the need to extensively retool existing IT infrastructure. The demonstration can be seen firsthand at booth #3905 at the National Retail Federation's (NRF) Big Show in New York City at the Jacob K. Javits Center from January 15-17. The Fujitsu Digital Workforce platform, purpose-built and comprising three services, streamlines common productivity bottlenecks that occur across a number of industries: Workers as a Service: Organizations assign digital workers to automate back-office processes. The service can be scaled to match the expected demands of the automated workload. Workforce as a Service: Cloud-based and instantly responsive to changes in demand, this service auto-scales to increase workers, accommodating increased demand over time or activity spikes and troughs as needed. Work as a Service: A true utility solution, with the Digital Workforce managing workload on a per-transaction commercial model, allowing users to link the service cost directly to the output delivered. Currently, a Digital Workforce trial is underway for a Fujitsu client in the retail industry, while digital workers have been deployed internally at Fujitsu where they are performing real-world tasks for clients across a number of verticals. Key metrics from Phase I of the internal deployment, which automated 10% of all alerts, include: 196% return on investment (ROI) with a projected net benefit of more than USD 3.3 million over four years; five times better transaction times when compared to a human worker performing the same activity in high-volume situations; 60% improved effectiveness during low-volume activity such as during off hours; 10% increased capacity of current staff to focus on high-value activity; 90,000 monitoring alerts processed per month, reducing the workload of Level 1 support staff, who are tasked with testing for false-positives, by 48% as well as higher-cost engineering support teams that are incorrectly passed those false-positives. Subsequent phases will increase automation with higher returns expected. Fujitsu Digital Workforce is expected to be available in fiscal 2017 in North America. Pricing varies according to model, configuration and country.