What is Intelligent Automation and Why is it Important to Business?
The Covid-19 pandemic has provided plenty of business disruption over the past two years. Service and supply chain issues have challenged traditional business models and remote workers have challenged traditional operational practices. The “Great Resignation” confronts businesses with high employee turnover intensified by an overall reduction in the available workforce.
Compounding these disruptions of the pandemic are the more fundamental challenges of doing business in the twenty-first century. Competitive challenges drive a constant need for innovation and operational excellence. Digital transformation and digital business models have become table stakes in today’s competitive environment, affecting operations, customer service, and employee support. Businesses must constantly reinvent themselves to create friction-free value for their customers while accelerating and scaling growth.
This perfect-storm combination of global pandemic and contemporary business challenges are driving transformational changes in the traditional people-process-technology models for modern business. Intelligent Automation enables that transformation.
What is Intelligent Automation?
At its core, Intelligent Automation is the combination of business process automation and artificial intelligence. It is known by several synonymous industry terms: Intelligent Process Automation (McKinsey), Hyperautomation (Gartner Group), AI-Powered Automation (IBM), and Cognitive Automation (Deloitte), among others.
Defined according to McKinsey, Intelligent Automation:
“is an emerging set of new technologies that combines fundamental process design with robotic process automation and machine learning. It is a suite of business-process improvements with next-generation tools that assists the knowledge worker by removing repetitive, replicable, and routine tasks.”
McKinsey, Intelligent Process Automation: The Engine at the Core of the Next-Generation Operating Model
Component technologies of Intelligent Automation include:
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA) allows software robots to act as a proxy for human interactions with digital systems, screens, and other software.
- Computer Vision provides visual recognition capabilities to digitize, for example, scanned documents.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) enables computerized understanding of language meaning and intention.
- Intelligent Chatbots act as cognitive agents allowing human-computer interaction enabled by NLP.
- Machine Learning uses advanced analytics to learn from process data and determine patterns that predict future outcomes.
- Process Mining tools uncover insightful patterns in process interactions to drive improvement and efficiency.
- Data Visualization provides visual insights for continued performance management and improvement.
Why is Intelligent Automation Important to Business?
Intelligent Automation enables the transformational operational improvement needed to address contemporary business challenges.
Intelligent automation enables digital operational excellence by improving business processes via:
- Improved cost savings
- Improved process quality through reduced manual errors
- Improved cycle time enables speed to fulfilment and resolution
- Scale and efficiency enables business growth without cost growth
- Process agility to allow customization, adaptability, and nuance
- Improved process efficacy
- Improved customer experience through speed to fulfilment and accuracy
- Operational resiliency accommodates both increased and diminished workloads
- Improved compliance capability to meet regulatory demands
- Process learning to monitor changes that drive continuous improvement
Many global businesses in multiple industries have made Intelligent Automation a strategic priority, driving proven returns on investment.
What is the Best Way to Get Started in Intelligent Automation?
Driving Intelligent Automation as a strategic priority can be accomplished through a path of best practices. First and most important is the establishment of executive buy-in and participation. Many use cases exist to prove the value and importance of Intelligent Automation, along with strong ROI examples to drive executive support.
Once executive support is established, a small-scale pilot is a great way to test the approach. A pilot helps to prove the concept while continuing to build support and sponsorship. It is important to define what success looks like via the pilot and to define appropriate measures and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Next, the composition of the pilot team will prove to be just as important as the determination of the business process to pilot. Intelligent Automation is not merely the application of technology by an IT team. While the pilot team should certainly include these technologists, it also needs to be multidisciplinary. On the pilot team, include individuals with expertise in analytics, process improvement, and the business domain being addressed. Identify stakeholders and incorporate them into the pilot as much as possible.
Finally, the completion of the pilot will provide many learnings as well as a go/no-go decision. It should drive a path forward with greater emphasis on scalability, total cost of ownership, support and administration, and additional targets for improvement within the organization.
Conclusion
Shorter-term pandemic disruptions and the longer-term demands of the modern-day business marketplace will continue to drive the need for digital operational excellence. Intelligent Automation tools and concepts enable these transformational operational improvements. Business organizations hoping to grow, innovate, and compete should identify Intelligent Automation as a strategic priority.
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