Automation Gets Smart: The Next Wave of Transformation

Intelligent automation, applied strategically, can free up employees to focus on more meaningful work, fostering innovation and making for a more rewarding environment.

Automation is quite the buzzword these days, but the reality is that companies have been automating business processes for years. What’s new to the game is an evolving type of “intelligent” automation, which harnesses the power of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and natural language processing to streamline both routine and complex business processes, boosting productivity and shifting the focus to higher-value work.

Can intelligence really raise the bar for automation?

Enterprise applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) help to automate back-office capabilities, but these systems still require a lot of manual data-entry work and complex configuration tuning, diminishing productivity returns. In addition, automation of these systems focuses primarily on binary processes; more nuanced tasks require higher-level thinking and direct human intervention, creating an opening for intelligent automation.

Intelligent automation’s impact can be felt in a variety of ways. For example, it can enhance robotic process automation (RPA), an increasingly popular way to automate repetitive business tasks, by providing additional context to create an end-to-end business process. Intelligent automation can also use cognitive services to help guide a business task or process — for example, using sentiment analysis to improve accuracy. Intelligence can also play a role in preventing bias in automation.

Proponents believe that in addition to efficiency and cost-savings benefits, intelligent automation’s ability to augment the workforce will free up employees to focus on more valuable business strategy and operations activities.

There no end to where and how AI-enabled automation should be applied.

Automation and AI can play a role across complex solutions and systems, learning more about interactions and generating efficiencies along the way in critical areas such as cybersecurity, DevOps, data centers, data management, and customer experience. And it’s not just the IT sector that stands to gain: A near endless list of industries is lining up to leverage the technology, including healthcare, education, life sciences, banking, insurance, and countless others.

While some argue it’s too early in the game for AI to make any quantifiable difference, others contend specific elements of the technology are already changing how work is done, streamlining business processes and untethering IT staffers from the burden of spending too much time on routine and repetitive busy work.

There are both technical and cultural hurdles to an AI-infused automation strategy.

On the technical side, lack of internal AI, cloud, and security skills can be a real barrier to a successful intelligent automation strategy. The relative immaturity of the technology can create another set of challenges. Additional hurdles include data quality, data management, and integration, including the ability to bridge data across cloud and on-premises sources effectively.

The cultural ramifications of intelligent automation are challenging and perhaps even more controversial. Many people worry about humans losing jobs to machines, and there are different schools of thought on how to successfully reskill and train workers so they can reap the benefits of higher-value work. In addition, there are ethical, legal, and financial issues still to be hammered out.

IT leaders must help manage expectations.

Some fear of the unknown is inevitable as top management mulls the strategic role of intelligent automation, and workers grapple with how the changes will affect their day-to-day roles as well as future career advancement.

IT leadership needs to take an active role in recalibrating expectations, doing the legwork to identify and focus on real business cases, not high-tech boondoggles. IT leaders should also make a point of harnessing the technology for incremental pilot projects, which showcase results they can use to garner buy-in and greenlight other initiatives. IT leaders who have the discipline to prioritize and focus on where the business can capture the most value will have a better shot at achieving long-term success.

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This article was written by the IDG editorial team.