Intelligent Automation aligns the digital needs of a firm with its strategic vision, thereby helping in achieving scalable transformation over time.
In an increasingly hyperconnected environment, organizations are accelerating their digital transformation programs. Process automation has emerged as a key focus area for building digital-first enterprises. To that end, Intelligent Automation (IA) is emerging as a key theme. IA allows organizations to leverage AI technologies to improve efficiency and expedite scale digital transformation.
Intelligent Automation (IA): Ways it Drives Scalable Digital Transformation
1. Enterprise-Wide Automation: Majority of firms that apply automation initially focus on performing tasks with minimal resources. Enterprises typically begin their automation journey with task automation—automating rule-based activities to reduce manual effort. IA helps these companies fully embrace automation’s potential to achieve large-scale digital transformation. Organizations have also started using robotic process automation (RPA) with AI-driven technologies. The use of Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVA), and Process Mining is becoming crucial. Process Orchestration and Advanced Analytics to scale enterprise-wide digital transformation are also becoming increasingly common. Firms are also using bespoke AI solutions leveraging ML, (NLP), computer vision, and deep learning to enable human-like decision-making capabilities. At the enterprise level, IA enables a digital-first approach and orchestrates work across human agents, digital workers, and enterprise systems. As intelligent automation continues to evolve, organizations are increasingly recognizing that simply automating isolated tasks is inadequate for achieving meaningful competitive advantage.
2. Optimizing What Matters: Automation is often deployed by organizations across mission-critical processes to achieve high levels of efficiency and quick cost savings. But without a well-thought-out plan, such initiatives will not give transformational benefits. As a result, the inability to manage a hybrid workforce, along with the orchestration of tasks between human and digital workers, often results in poorly utilized automation solutions and suboptimal returns. Scaling automation across the enterprise is a common challenge due to a lack of a unified operational view. These factors result in siloed automation deployments that fail to maximize impact. IA solves these issues through the infusion of next-generation technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP). Many organizations today are fast-tracking through traditional incremental automation phases and moving to IA at scale. This strategy paves the way for businesses to enable end-to-end process automation.
3. Being Agile, Fast, and Future-Ready: IA is the key to empowering businesses with high-quality and agile digital solutions in today’s hyper-competitive landscape. Solutions that have gained notable traction include AI-powered automation solutions—like IDP, IVA, process mining, orchestration, and analytics—because of their ability to reduce manual effort and move at a faster processing speed with fewer errors. Agile is increasingly being leveraged by mature Enterprises. By broadening the scope of these technologies, businesses improve operational effectiveness, facilitate digital transformation, and stay competitive.
Road Ahead: Adopting IA as a Digital Catalyst
The majority of mature adopters today are shifting from process automation to enterprise-wide deployment of IA, increasing their technology scope to extend automation across all business functions. Intelligent Automation has become a primary driver for next-generation digital transformation. IA provides advantages such as increased efficiency, accuracy, scalability, and compliance. Organizations investing in smart automation projects deliver the following business benefits:
a) Strategic Gains – Revenue increase, increased ROI, increased business continuity, higher customer satisfaction, and better employee experience.
b) Cost Optimisation – Cost reduction, added FTE capacity, and increased efficiency in automation.
c) Operational effect – Increased productivity, increased efficiency, decreased turnaround time, and improved governance and compliance.
Businesses can achieve unprecedented scalability, agility, and competitive edge with intelligence in the digital-first era. The advantage that IA brings is the end-to-end automation for businesses, besides helping firms align their digital-first approach with a strategic vision. This ensures that the firm’s digital transformation goals fully sync with its growth strategy and deliver optimum results to all stakeholders in the business ecosystem.