Disruptive technologies are now transforming business operations and enabling organizations to create greater value for all stakeholders. Intelligent Automation is one such technology that is now revolutionizing industries by making automation smarter.
Intelligent automation combines automation and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and employs technologies like machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, etc. to perform complex tasks with minimal human intervention.
Intelligent automation has a variety of applications and effectively simplifies processes, frees up resources, and improves operational efficiencies.
The Rise of Intelligent Automation
The world of work has become more connected, competitive, and complex. Businesses today want to incorporate more intelligence into a variety of their systems and processes to evolve into intelligent enterprises.
Enterprises are looking at digital technologies to help them drive competitiveness and deliver better customer and employee experiences. They need better responsiveness to market and customer demands, and the ability to leverage opportunities as they arise.
Intelligent automation addresses these needs and allows enterprises to create business value. It frees up employees by removing repetitive, replicable, and routine tasks and allows them to do more strategic and value-driven work. It also reduces the costs of business processes, tech operations, and infrastructure and can radically improve customer journeys with faster processes and simplified interactions.
Given the benefits it brings to the table, the global Intelligent Automation market is set to cross $25.9 billion by 2027.
How Intelligent Automation Drives Competitive Advantage
Intelligent automation can use large volumes of data and combine that with precise calculations and analysis to help drive business decisions. Some of how intelligent automation drives competitive advantage are by:
From customer satisfaction to customer delight
Intelligent automation combines RPA and AI, two complementary technologies, and enables enterprises to adapt processes quickly to impact customer experiences positively. Technologies like NLP, intelligent document processing (IDP), and business process management (BPM), when combined with automation, can provide clear solutions to complex problems.
Intelligent automation allows enterprises to combine chatbots, NLP, smart forms, etc., to create responsive and intelligent customer interactions without needing to add more people and without modification of internal systems.
This move towards customer-centricity translates to greater profits since data shows that customer-centric companies are almost 60% more profitable than companies that are not.
Greater efficiency and better quality of business processes
Organizations need to respond to constant market disruptions, technology evolution, and constantly shifting market demands. For this, business processes need to be agile and responsive.
Eliminating manual processes and replacing them with intelligent automation removes inconsistencies and errors that can come with human intervention. As more processes get automated, intelligence in the form of AI helps to improve time efficiencies and gain deeper insights that assist in removing unwanted variances.
Intelligent automation brings a consistent approach to repetitive tasks and makes them more reliable, efficient, and hard-working.
With this technology, enterprises can identify and understand what drives quality and focus on managing variables that can be controlled and remove wasteful processes. It improves data accuracy and reduces the risk of transactional errors. These can include incorrect data inputs, errors in rule application missed steps, etc.
Intelligent automation employs machine learning algorithms to gather, organize, track, analyze, report, and store data. This data can be employed to identify process gaps and address issues, assess areas of operational improvements, develop best practices, and drive greater process efficiencies.
Intelligent Automation works like a Swiss Army Knife and employees with new capabilities through analytics and AI and frees up time for creativity and critical thinking.
Regulatory, compliance, and audit landscape
Intelligent automation helps organizations navigate an increasingly complex and tough regulatory landscape. It allows enterprises to reconcile data from disparate systems and also provides a completely traceable trail. Since intelligent automation traces every process from start to end it allows enterprises to ensure greater compliance.
It also makes it easier to scale processes to address regulatory changes and also reduces errors that impact compliance.
Improved time-to-market
Intelligent automation can help development teams work faster and with greater accuracy. It enables them to streamline complex and disparate workflows, adds agility to continuous delivery and continuous integration pipelines, and improves DevOps management.
Automating routine tasks and constantly improving automated decision-making as the release moves through the delivery lifecycle is achievable with intelligent automation. Intelligence applied to the release process coupled with integration tools helps to automate the detection of security risks and proactively flags release candidates for remediation.
Better service time and greater security
Speed, whether to improve service time or address security gaps, is essential for enterprises. Downtime due to security breaches, and processes that impact service time and can be prone to vulnerabilities have an impact on productivity and competitiveness.
Intelligent automation accelerates the service time and makes it easier for enterprises to respond to service requests faster. It also helps them identify potential security risks and correct them fast. Fewer vulnerabilities lead to lesser downtime which automatically translates into increased competitiveness.
Fueling digital enterprises
Digital transformation is now an established precursor for growth. Enterprises across industries are now working at aligning business strategies with digital strategies to increase competitiveness. In this, enterprises recognize the value in redefining operational processes around new technologies to ensure consistent service delivery and display greater customer centricity.
Technologies like AI, Big Data, and Intelligent Automation stand at the forefront of digitization and assist enterprises to optimize customer experiences, drive product/service/offer customizations, and mitigate risks. Enterprises can better integrate gathered data into their current ecosystem with intelligent automation to further strengthen decision-making capabilities.
Intelligent automation is a crucial part of the digitization agenda and drives true operational transformation by layering automation with intelligence. Effective intelligent automation allows easier access to relevant data, that leads to more informed, faster, and effective decisions. It also expands the scope of automation across a variety of processes. Improved customer experiences, fewer errors, lower risks of fraud and data manipulation, and higher productivity with streamlined processes help enterprises drive productivity and competitiveness in a complex, challenging, constantly changing dynamic market.
