The Automation Economy: Unleashing Human Potential
The global events of the past two years have led business leaders to adapt to the idea that disruption is now the new normal. Constant reinvention is the need of the hour as workforce issues, supply chain disruptions, and customer engagements are more complex than ever before.
These are not just pandemic-induced operational issues that will go away anytime soon. These changes herald the advent of a new world in which stability and resilience are key business priorities. However, for many organisations, intelligent automation, has become the answer to many of these challenges. We are now entering the Automation Economy.
The Automation Economy constitutes a radical shift where oganisations in every industry are adopting automation as a foundational technology that runs across their entire business. By 2030, automation is predicted to have a combined global impact value of USD 15 trillion.
When The Going Gets Tough, Automation Keeps Us Going
When vital systems go down or supply chain issues, or staff shortages threaten businesses from working as usual, automation is helping to bridge the gap. With it, companies are becoming agile in ways they never expected, making it easier to adapt to whatever challenge might come next.
In some cases, automation has been lifesaving. A general hospital in the United Kingdom deployed intelligent automation to monitor oxygen tank levels closely to ensure they had constant and accurate readings readily available during the pandemic. Remember, this was a time when healthcare organizations across the world saw a rapid rise in the number of patients requiring oxygen support, and healthcare staff were already under immense pressure. Especially at times like these, reducing manual efforts can truly save lives.
For organisations in other industries as well, automation has helped to not just fix crucial issues but drive business growth. Energy companies for instance, grapple with legacy systems, multiple data sources and manual, repetitive processes that get in the way of driving speed and impact. To deal with such issues, IndianOil Corporation Limited (IOCL) automated select key processes across departments including finance, HR, Inventory, etc, using a cloud-native, AI-powered automation. The company even tapped into the collective intellect of their employees by organizing an enterprise-wide RPA botathon event where hundreds of employees and citizen developers created automation assistants to unlock innovation. Today, IOCL is successfully scaling automation to improve operating agility, tap into innovation, connect disparate systems, and at the same time, empower employees to work more efficiently.
The Co-worker Of Dreams: Reliable, Efficient, Digital
Automation is augmenting the efforts of human workers and shifting their attention toward tasks that technology alone cannot execute. At a time when organisations are trying to improve employee engagement and satisfaction at work, deploying digital coworkers, or automated software bots, has freed employees from some manual tasks to focus innovation and productivity.
When human workers are empowered with automation, we can unleash their potential to invest time and energy to the next big idea. According to McKinsey, 30 per cent of work tasks can be automated – this gives employees the time for upskilling, citizen development training, and opportunities for idea-generation.
Businesses Need An Intelligent Neural Network
Every business is complicated, with many moving parts. Deciding what to automate first, what implementations to amplify, how best to integrate the entire enterprise so automation implementations benefit from economies of scale, can be a mammoth task in itself. Today, there are process discovery tools that can map out which employee functions benefit from automation, while tracking returns on investment for that implementation.
The sophistication of such tools helps business leaders understand their entire business better- it gives them visibility through data, into the day-to-day of each function, so they know which ones can benefit from more support, and which ones may not be tapping into the creative power of their employees. This essentially functions as an intelligent neural network for business.
Ultimately, the purpose of any technology is to make our lives easier and help us reach our potential. That is the promise of the Automation Economy – it puts the benefits of automation into the hands of every employee. With this power, the potential of innovation and new business value is unleashed.
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