How is intelligent automation helping enterprises optimize business performance
With an increase in digital adoption over the past few years, several Indian enterprises are using the power of automation to support their digital transformation efforts. Different organizations across industries are leveraging different strategies to boost their automation journey. With India’s artificial intelligence capabilities poised to reach $881 million by 2023, automation has moved beyond simply reducing costs. It is a new paradigm for value creation, better decision-making, and growing businesses. Digital transformation in India has entered an era of intelligent automation, which pairs automation with cognitive technology such as artificial intelligence to guide better business decisions and bring new opportunities to light.
WNS
“At WNS, we believe that transformation-led business outcomes are driven through the implementation of multiple technology levers. Intelligent automation plays a critical role in business transformation as it demonstrates immediate results, thereby accelerating outcomes and benefits. The deployment of intelligent automation is a phase-wise journey for clients across multiple processes. We scale up our efforts as we discover value in the automation of newer processes or in further optimizing the automated processes. For example, RPA was earlier used to help with simple, repetitive activities. Now, RPA combined with AI and ML can handle more complex and decision-intensive tasks. It is crucial to develop a strategic roadmap for the adoption of intelligent automation. Selecting the right processes to automate and proper planning with the operations teams have consistently helped to achieve the desired outcomes, including maximum productivity and optimal utilization of licenses and other costs. Also, given the non-intrusive nature of intelligent automation, it has helped us drive scale and efficiency without heavy capital investments. Moreover, cloud-based RPA models have certainly proved quite useful for us.” – Suhrid Brahma, CTO, WNS
Automation Anywhere
“With unprecedented adoption across multiple industries, institutions of all sizes globally are leveraging intelligent automation to drive incredible value. The potential for this technology increases enterprise agility, freeing up humans to pivot to the next big idea, build deeper customer relationships and drive business growth. A major benefit of RPA is that it improves business outcome, increases customer satisfaction and enables competitive advantage by freeing humans to do what they do best which is solving problems, resulting in higher employee engagement and new revenue opportunity. Often, automation is perceived as a challenge because companies lack experience or vision. However, industries such as finance, insurance, healthcare, and many more are reaping the benefits of optimized business processes with the help of automation.” – Milan Sheth, EVP IMEA, Automation Anywhere.
Uber
“With the current computational capability and network speed in today’s world, it is now possible to collect data, process, learn, and recommend patterns at scale, which can significantly improve the customer experience. In essence, AI uses methods to analyse large-scale data and make informed real-time decisions. In many respects, the ability to make such decisions at such speed is quite transformational for mobility. To make travel safer, more dependable, and highly personalized for everyone, everywhere, Uber has integrated ML/AI into many aspects of its mobility business, from matching riders with drivers to providing food recommendations, improving ETAs, inferring customer issue types, and automating contact resolution for better support experience for our riders, earners, and merchants.” – Jayaram Valliyur, Senior Director, Core Engineering, Uber
ANSR
“We use intelligent automation to manage small, transactional, repetitive activities. It helps to refocus people on more exciting activities and activities that are also delivering more value for their companies, freeing up workers to take on more creative elements of their work. From procurement to healthcare and transportation, the potential applications for intelligent automation are wide-ranging
It’s imperative that one understands the ground work and prerequisites that need to be addressed before we embark into the journey of automation. When working on smart automation projects, business requirements and user needs should come first, and technology implementation second.
The maturity of the processes is a whole other factor, if processes are unlikely to change in the short term, the more suitable they are for automation. Also, the higher the comprised volume, the higher the return on investment will be, due to the inherent fixed development costs. As automation is deployed across the organization, supporting the program through robust Change Management is critical, as it encompasses three kinds of change that need to be managed: people, systems, and processes.
A common mistake is for automation products to fall under the IT umbrella and its acquisition to be monitored through the lens of traditional IT procurement. Because automation is first and foremost a business tool, automation should be recognized as digital labor that is managed by the business—not a piece of software implemented by IT.
In summary, when considering automation as an option, organisations need to focus on diagnosing the business problems they are trying to resolve first, before identifying the processes that are eligible. Smart automation needs to be adopted in a holistic approach – organisations need to remember it involves people and teams, not just technology platforms and back-end tools.” – Srividya Gokhle, AVP, ANSR
